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psibase 0.17.0-pre highlights

psibase 0.17.0-pre was released!

There are too many updates to go through all of them in detail, but this article highlights two of the main themes in the 0.17.0-pre update.

Preparations for fractal application

It has been determined that the rest of the psibase infrastructure has reached a sufficient maturity level that we can begin to redevelop (for the nth time) an application to facilitate the creation of “fractals,” which are a kind of web3 DAO with a novel bottom-up governance system.

To that end, in this release, we:

1. PR #1188 — Removed the old fractals service, which was written multiple years ago and has long been outdated.
2. PR #1112 — Added the evaluations app. Running an evaluation is a bit like running a poll, with the goal of finding a group’s opinion on the best rank-ordering of a set of elements. The ability to run these special polls is critical to the concept of fractal governance, in which a DAO evaluates its own members for the purpose of discovering leaders and allocating resources.
   Although there exists a very bare-bones front-end, the evaluations app is, at this stage, primarily intended to be a library that can be used by other applications to more easily create and manage the process of running an evaluation.

Package management improvements

A psibase network acts as a package repository, like crates.io or npmjs.com, except for hosting packages that contain full-stack web3 applications (front-end, plugins, back-end services). In addition to hosting the packages on the network, the packages are also usually installed on the network (in order to make the apps contained in the packages available for use).

The package management infrastructure is still in its infancy, but this release saw some notable improvements.

Related PRs: [PR #1156, PR #1151, PR #1150, PR #1166, PR #1172, PR #1176]

1. The package-related CLI tooling now has better error handling/reporting.
2. Any account on psibase can now be used as a package repository.
3. psibase list --updates — This is a new flag on the preexisting psibase list command that allows the user to see if some installed packages have updated versions available in a package repository.

$ psibase list -a dev --package-source root --updates
Chainmail 0.17.0->0.18.0

4. psibase upgrade — This is a new command that has been added to allow a user to perform the upgrade of an installed package (or packages).

5. The installed status has been added to the output of psibase info:

$ psibase info Accounts

name: Accounts-0.17.0
status: installed
description: This service facilitates the creation of new accounts
service: accounts
  server: r-accounts
  files:
    /account-tokens.wasm
    /index.html
    /index.js
    /plugin.wasm
    /style.css
    /vendor-40235661.js
    /vite.svg
service: r-accounts

6. psibase search now shows the versions of the reported packages:

$ psibase search Tokens

Tokens 0.17.0

Conclusion

The reason package management is a focus right now is because as we are working and creating new versions of various packages, we are attempting to keep a persistent testnet up to date with all of the latest packages, so we can better understand the process that will be required when there is a public persistent network.

To do this well, we needed better tooling for working with unpublished and published packages.

Hopefully, this helps contextualize the updates in psibase v0.17.0-pre .

Until next time,
James