[tor-dev] Sathya's status report - July 2012

[Sathyanarayanan Gunasekaran]

July 2012

- Attended Tor dev meeting and hackfest in Florence in the first week of July.

- Talked to arma, Karsten and asn about helping out with certain
metrics tasks(#6460, #6232) to figure out the safety of the Tor
network. Hopefully, I can extend this to something bigger and hack on
it for my undergrad thesis.

- Hacked on a entropy-over-time script(#6232) with help from Karsten,
phw and asn.

- Pair programmed with neena, helping him with his GSoC work(the
consensus and votes descriptor parser).

- Discussed pyonionoo components on the tor-dev mailing list[0].

- Hacked on the web service for pyonionoo for a bit at the hackfest.
Megan is currently refactoring it and making it awesome.

- Started work on the  pyonionoo backend(#6452) -
  - Completed the network status document parser for summary documents
  - Taught pyonionoo about stem to parse server descriptors for
details documents
  - Next up - Refactor this and add bandwidth documents.

- Finished ExitPolicy parser for stem(#5454), which Damian ended up
rewriting mostly.

- Discussed the proper way to check if the Tor control socket is
closed or not(#6234) which led to "Tor should have a PING command to
check"(#6354), but arma and nickm are of the opinion that we shouldn't
have any more pre-auth commands since it makes Tor more complex / less
safe. Stem now makes a best-effort call (errors ignored) since we just
want the socket to shut down and we don't need the QUIT to succeed to
do that.

- Discussed about setting up a code review tool(#6402). I've set up an
ec2 instance with ReviewBoard and will hopefully set up the repos with
some help from Damian soon-ish.

[0] - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-July/003731.html