[GNUnet-developers] Proposal: Make GNUnet Great Again?

[Schanzenbach, Martin]

Hi,

over the past few months that I have spent building and trying to 
deploy/release GNUnet based software I was hit more than once by its 
significant size and complexity.
What I mean by that is beautifully illustrated by what I call myself the 
"GNUnet Spaghetti Monster": https://stage.gnunet.org/en/architecture.html .
In my opinion, this conflation of low-level functionality (transport, DHT, 
crypto, utilities) and applications/services (secushare/social/psyc, voting, 
conversation, fs, reclaim and maybe even gns) is detrimental to efficiently 
manage a GNUnet "product".

My proposal: Either with 0.11 or beyond but definitely after TNG is done we 
should strive to separate the apps wrt code but also presentation (e.g. 
website).
First, by having gnunet-ext [1] style repos for the apps.
Weather a GNUnet app lives @gnunet.org or somewhere else shouldn't really 
matter that way.

My hope is that this will significantly simplify the code and build of GNUnet 
"base" and allow users/packagers to cleanly separate dependencies.
We might run into app dependency and GNUnet base build dependency which might 
not be trivial. Hence 0.11 is probably not feasible.

WDYT?

[1] https://gnunet.org/git/gnunet-ext.git/

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