Development Update – April 2021

Easter is coming up, so we have some technical surprises for you!

Development history

Our community member Gandalf86 pointed out, that with the Git extension git-filter-repo [1] it is possible to reunite our development history with the history of our ancestors. In fact the Alias Git repository is a fork of ShadowCash [2] but that was not visible so far, as the initial commit in 2016 was done as exactly that: An initial commit instead of a change on a forked repository. We want to fix this before the next release.

But there’s one important thing to know: All Git hashes starting from the initial commit aa80c202 [3] will change because they need to be calculated new. That means that all existing forks can’t use the new repository as upstream anymore. Also, the historic release assets will not be available anymore at the main repository. To handle this with the least impact, we will solve this the following way.

Step 1
The current main repository alias-wallet will be renamed to alias-wallet-archived. After that, the repository still contains all the tags at the original hashes and also all release assets. After that, the repository state will be set to “archived“, so it can’t be updated anymore but is still accessible.

Step 2
A new repository with the former name alias-wallet will be created and the reunited history pushed into it. This “new” repository contains also all tags at the proper position in the history but it did not contain any release assets. The next release will be the first release at the new, full-history repository and the assets of this release will be available on the corresponding release tag as usual.

Step 3
A comment with a link to the archive repository will be put onto the tags of the last major release line. With that, it is clear why the artifacts are no longer available at the current (new) repository and where they are now.

This approach was presented to the Github support and they gave us green light to go ahead. After that, it will be possible to add the fork relationship to ShadowCash [2]. If you like to see the required steps for this change in detail, have a look at History-Reunion [4] on our wiki. There’s a detailed explanation of why and how.

Localization

The localization of our wallet is making good progress! So with the translation of Portuguese, we have completed seven different languages now:

• French (fr)
• German (de)
• Italian (it)
• Portuguese (Brazil, pt_BR)
• Russian (ru)
• Spanish (es)
• Spanish (Mexico, es_MX)

Everyone who is interested to make an own contribution to the project is invited to join! Please head over to Transifex [5], create an account, and jump onto the language you like to translate. A big thank you to all the translators, who already contributed!

References

[1] https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo
[2] https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow
[3] https://github.com/aliascash/alias-wallet/commit/aa80c2023c2ab37a38722267f399e30bc3e516aa
[4] https://github.com/aliascash/documentation/wiki/History-Reunion
[5] https://www.transifex.com/alias-1/

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