feather/MAINTENANCE.md

Maintenance priority

This document is written for developers and users interested in learning how Feather is developed.

1. Security

• Fix security issues and privacy leaks affecting Feather
  • Note: If you believe to have found a vulnerability, please refer to SECURITY.md
• Rebase the Monero submodule on top of the latest monero-project/monero tag
  • Monero releases may contain undisclosed security fixes
• Update or patch statically linked dependencies that have known vulnerabilities
  • Run feather-utils/depends/vulns.py to check
  • Review the diff of any altered package to mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks
• Update compilers and security flags for better binary security
• Reduce the number of third-party dependencies
• Keep the website VPS up-to-date and secure
• Further harden the release process

Goals:

• Set up a bug bounty program for issues that affect privacy or security

Security issues that affect Feather always warrant a new release as soon as possible.

2. Reproducibility

• Improve and maintain tools to check for reproducibility defects
• Ensure releases are reproducible and stay that way
• Upload source archives to the fallback mirror

Goals:

• Update Guix to benefit from the full-source bootstrap
• Implement a system for verified reproduction

To learn more about Feather's build system, see: contrib/guix/README.md

Bootstrappable builds are a requirement for all release builds since version 2.2.2. Our Guix time-machine is currently pinned at a commit which implements the reduced binary seed bootstrap.

3. Bugs

• Fix reproducible bugs and crashes

To report a bug, please see: https://docs.featherwallet.org/guides/report-an-issue

4. Tests

• Improve test coverage
• Write more test cases

Feather does not currently have a test suite (apart from the tests in the Monero submodule), this is a WIP.

5. Documentation

• Make sure the documentation accurately reflects the latest release
• Add troubleshooting guides for common problems
  • Ideally, most support questions can be answered with a link to the documentation

Goals:

• Reconsider and document default settings

Documentation is available at https://docs.featherwallet.org

6. Improvements

• Improve existing features
• Improve UI/UX

Feather should first and foremost be a good wallet. Improving features that are closer to this end should have priority.

7. Packaging

• Package Feather for more distributions
• Add support for more architectures and operating systems
• Drop support for End-of-Life distributions

Goals:

• Bootstrappable Flatpaks
• Debian and Guix packages
• Create a document with guidelines for packagers

See: https://docs.featherwallet.org/guides/supported-operating-systems

8. Optimization, cleanup and continuity

Miscellaneous maintenance tasks.

• Remove dead code
• Fix compiler warnings
• Optimize release binary size
• Speed up the release process
• Automate recurrent maintenance tasks
• Refactor code that is in need of refactoring
• Add comments to the code where necessary
• Reduce complexity in the codebase where possible
• Improve documentation for developers and maintainers
• Keep the build system, toolchain and dependencies modern
• Remove features if their maintenance burden outweighs their usefulness

Goals:

• Make sure Feather is ready for the migration to Seraphis

9. Features

• Implement new features
  • Allow Feather to be used or configured for higher, esoteric or new threat models
  • Add experimental features that may later be adopted in the reference wallets
  • Add features that are generally useful and relevant

Every added feature increases the amount of work needed to maintain Feather. Consider the usefulness of a feature compared to its expected maintenance and support burden.

For a non-exhaustive list of potentially new features, see: https://featherwallet.org/ideas

10. Upstreaming

• Upstream tried and tested features, bugfixes and useful patches
  • Bugfixes should be upstreamed without delay

Goals:

• Upstream polyseed
• Upstream bootstrappable builds using Guix as a replacement for the now deprecated Gitian build system