Contribute

General discussion and support

For general discussion of Ouroboros, subscribe to our mailing list: ouroboros@freelists.org.

For day-to-day discussions, join our IRC chat: #ouroboros.

Contact us on twitter: @ODecentralize

Contributing code

Contributions should be sent as patches to the mailing list, using your real name and real e-mail address.

The git repository contains three branches:

  • master: Contains the most stable version of Ouroboros.
  • testing: Contains tested code but may still contain bugs.
  • be: Contains untested but compiling code.

New development is done against the ‘be’ branch of the git repository. The testing and master branches take only bugfixes.

Bug reporting

Please report all bugs here. When reporting a bug, please do the following:

  1. Provide a description of the bug. How did you get it and which version of Ouroboros were you using? Which Operating System are you on?
  2. Provide as much technical information as possible (system logs, debug traces, ...).
  3. If possible, provide a minimal code example to reproduce the bug.
  4. If you can provide a bugfix, provide it against the HEAD of the most stable branch where the bug is present and send the patch to the mailing list.

Todo list

We are currently looking for

  • Testing and bugfixing.
  • Integration testing for the build system beyond the “make check” unit tests.
  • People that are interested in setting up some nodes to establish a global testing layer.
  • Non-blocking flow allocation: Allow specifying a {0, 0} timespec to return immediately and use fevent() to know when the flow is ready (or allocation failed).
  • Asynchronous IPC over the UNIX sockets. For each command to the IRMd, we create a UNIX socket, send the request and wait for the response. This could be changed so that there is only a single UNIX socket that is used for all messaging. This would simplify parallel querying of the IPCPs and speed up flow allocation. The far-future option is to ditch UNIX sockets and bootstrap Ouroboros local IPC over itself.
  • ECDH-AES encryption using libssl and/or libgcrypt. The goal is to support both libraries so that we have a fallback should major bugs be discovered in one of them.
  • Customized packet serialization to remove the dependency on Google Protocol Buffers. We like GPB, but it’s not perfect. Importing .proto files may give rise to multiple definitions and we found no way to solve that.
  • Caching for the DHT.
  • Cross-compilation to OpenWRT (musl).
  • Ported applications! If you want to add native Ouroboros support for your applications, just let us know and we will help you out!