Re: [Taler] What happened to your schedule?

[Christian Grothoff]

On 1/31/19 11:12 PM, David Kleuker wrote:
> You are about a year behind.
> 
> https://gnunet.org/bugs/roadmap_page.php

True.

> Was the estimate wrong or has something happened that pushed you back?

Yes, we wasted some time due to uncontrollable external circumstances
with a partner not working out on the business side. We also had some
moderate changes to the plan, with additional business and/or
theoretical insights requiring some features to be added that simply
were not on the original list (and some of those are still to be
implemented). Plus 2/3 team members developed some major distractions
(including me going from a 100% research position to a mostly teaching
position, and still not finding research funding or investment into
Taler to change that). There were also probably a few things that simply
took longer, but the main issue I think were extra issues and an
unexpectedly severe reduction in man power.

In good news, Florian will defend his thesis at the end of February, so
that should help a _lot_.  OTOH, we right now expect that his future
funding (not yet finally confirmed through) will force him to focus on a
feature that's not even on the roadmap page, so there might be another
roadmap change if that works out...

> (Can you update it with more realistic dates?)

Done, but as I said above, with the caveat that there are likely
additional changes based simply on business/funding requirements that I
cannot fully predict. In particular, several key features (bank
integration, regulatory restrictions, additional platform support) are
right now not even in the bug tracker and depending on where they drop
and what they look like, that might push other things back.  Also some
features that are on the list might end up more complex than anticipated
(for example, the original plan was to do a simple encrypted backup, but
the regulatory side suggests that a key escrow *option* might be
required -- and implementing that properly with secret splitting and the
associated business logic would most likely push back 0.9 beyond what is
in the plan now).

But the biggest issue to planning the timeline this far out is
consistent funding. For now, this remains unresolved as we continue to
not have the funding to finish the road map (and we never had, with or
without the moderate delays due changes to circumstances). So for now,
we are meddling through there (for example with me working on Taler only
in my spare time), but that's of course a distraction that prevents
achieving predictable development velocity.