Issue Summaries - September 21st, 2018

Issue Summaries

September 21st, 2018

Like most open source projects, Blockstack has created many channels to interact with the community both asynchronously (the forum, github, etc) and in realtime (slack, telegram, meetups, hackathons, etc). We’re experimenting with a practice of posting bi-weekly issue summaries. With this, we wanted to assess a periodic, comprehensive snapshot of reported issues, as a starting point to optimize our engineering cycles by prioritizing the most critical and impactful issues in the community.

We decided to kick this off by first accumulating user feedback through the numerous venues we interact with the community in an open source environment.

We currently report issues by both developers, users who host blockstack-core nodes and users who do not host nodes, together. Many of the issues currently overlap.

We then decided to address these issues in sprints, reporting on the issues we tackle in each sprint in a public kanban here: https://github.com/orgs/blockstack/projects/29.

We always recommend checking the kanban to see what Engineers are working on in regards to user reported issues. The current process for how issues end up in the kanban is as follows:

  • A report of the issues, both outstanding and new from the previous two weeks, will be posted every other week, before the beginning of a new sprint on the forum by Friday 11:59pm EST.

    • The goal of this is that it can be read by Engineers before the Monday engineering meetings.
  • Engineers will respond in the forum with issues they are working on. If these are new issues not mentioned previously in the thread, they should elaborate on those issues.

  • After the meeting, the topics posted on in the forum, and any changes based on conversation in the open meetings will be posted in the kanban https://github.com/orgs/blockstack/projects/29, where you can keep track of issues throughout the sprint.

  • A summary of issues fixed in each sprint will be posted the Wednesday after each sprint. Issues resolved in the previous sprint are listed here: Blockstack Bug Fix Sprint in Review - September 12, 2018

As we are focused on addressing the most impactful issues, we anticipate some issues be addressed across multiple sprints, with the kanban providing support for dedicating Engineering cycles to prioritizing these issues.

We welcome your feedback and review.

Issues Resolved in Previous Sprint

Unplanned downtime on Blockstack Core Nodes

Auth returning incomplete data

React Support

Android SDK Support

Upcoming Sprint [09/21/2018 - 10/04/2018] Overview

Bugs and Errors under Investigation

Automatically restore all IDs on restore

Proposal: Proposal: Auto-fetch IDs with activity

Github Open bug for proposal: blockstack/blockstack-browser#1550

Some bug reports:

Proofs don’t work unless you have installed Blockstack downloadable

blockstack/blockstack-browser#1643

blockstack/blockstack-browser#1629

Cannot open Blockstack apps on Chromebook

blockstack/blockstack-browser#1669

Fix Help button on screen during auth

github

Error popups don’t display on mobile

blockstack/blockstack-browser#1639

CORS proxy fails to fetch in macOS Safari and mobile Safari

blockstack/blockstack-browser#1638

Add gaia hub write url to profile.json

blockstack/blockstack.js#540

Better error message when no internet permission

blockstack/blockstack-android#84

React-native example app

Issue Report: Mobile Development using React-Native

Transit private key change

blockstack/blockstack.js#331

  • People have reported this issue both on this github issue, and someone brought it up on our slack as well
  • Basically — the transit private key changes between when the authRequest was generated and when the application tried to validate and log the user in.
  • The most common cases where this happen are (1) trying to sign into a blockstack app in incognito mode, and (2) a different default browser is set on your computer than the one you tried to log in with.

Requesting email scope doesn’t return email

Blockstack.js storage routines difficult to use outside of logged in web app

Github gist proofs should fail if the gist is a fork

Sponsored name copy on the “More IDs” page (1)

  • This needs to say “usable immediately” when registered from the more IDs page, rather than the normal on-boarding flow.

Connecting to regtest/testnet from browser is not trivial

Hosting blockstack-core nodes is difficult for non power users

  • This is feedback from enthusiasts on #engineering
  • Potential solutions:
    • re-instate apt package installs
    • improved dockerfiles (images could be much smaller, instructions could be better)

New CLI is hard to install

Legacy wallet transfers

  • There’s a whole host of legacy wallet formats (e.g., the scrypted wallet.json files, old derivation paths from the browser, the older, improper key-lengthened encrypted wallet.jsons) that people occasional need to deal with — we should have a utility to help with that
  • Forum:

Confusing or non-existent error codes in blockstack.js

Email screen copy in restore flow is inaccurate

Non-square Avatars don’t render correctly

Check out our kanban to the most up to date status of these ongoing issues!

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