Meeting summary: Seraphis Wallet Workgroup, 16 January 2023

This is a comprehensive summary, with added reference links, of the Seraphis Wallet Workgroup meeting¹ from January 16th 2023, 1800 UTC.

Logs

The raw, unedited, full log file for this meeting:

230116-seraphis.log (113 lines)

Summary

Note: it is possible that some relevant information may be missing from this summary; read the full log file for the complete, unedited discussion.

• Participants: 10 (one-horse-wagon², ghostway³, rbrunner7⁴, dangerousfreedom⁵, gingeropolous⁶, jberman⁷, ofrnxmr⁸, Rucknium⁹, JoshBabb¹⁰, UkoeHB¹¹)

• (1) On Seraphis¹² progress reports:

• dangerousfreedom reported that he is still working on the knowledge proofs and expects to present a first complete draft by next week

• jberman successfully used UkoeHB’s Seraphis library to scan a legacy testnet chain from scratch and recover a wallet’s balance¹³

• (2) On using a formalized formatting system for comments (Doxygen)¹⁴:

• ghostway thought that Doxygen with clang format would be okay; dangerousfreedom agreed

• rbrunner7 shared an example of what comments in ‘Doxygen style’ look like in the existing Monero codebase¹⁵ and noted that the system is quite big and it looks a bit like overkill; ghostway pointed out that using just a subset is still ok

• JoshBabb noted that although doxygen-generated comments aren’t terribly useful, one can appreciate them alongside code styles and linting as a reminder to comment by providing a designated and pre-styled place for them

• rbrunner7 acknowledged that the recommendation was to more or less follow koe’s style as visible in the header files of the Seraphis library

• (3) On the ambiguity of the term ‘account’ (vs ‘wallet’)¹⁶:

• rbrunner7 was wondering if the use of the term ‘account’ as a synonym for ‘wallet’ is widespread and proposed the workgroup finds a way to circumvent the clash of using the term ‘account’ for 2 different things

• UkoeHB shared his point of view: a wallet is a stateful thing, while an account is more abstract and noted that calling the base keys your wallet creates ambiguity

• rbrunner7 linked to the Moneropedia ‘Account’ entry¹⁷, for reference

• one-horse-wagon suggested getting rid of the term account and sticking with wallets, since there is very little difference between the two terms

• dangerousfreedom liked the straight hierarchy of wallet->account->addresses

• jberman thought that it makes more sense to change the CryptoNote class ‘account’ and keep the term ‘account’ as used to describe the feature to divide wallets by accounts, in an effort to avoid confusing users

Let me know if you find this kind of report helpful.

Feedback, edits always welcome @/about.

-3RA