[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - November 2012

[Damian Johnson]

November was a month that included eating far too much pie. There was
some stem work too on the side, though delicious pumpkin pies are
always how that month should be remembered.

My primary focus for November was tor event handling [1], which is the
last major feature we need before having parity with TorCtl. We
presently support nine of the nineteen event types, including the most
commonly used ones (logging, BW, CIRC, STREAM, etc). I'll be spending
a good chunk of December finishing this up.

Besides this I've been really thrilled at how contributors are coming
out of the woodwork to help!

Ravi

* Ravi has volunteered to take a lead on moving stem onto tor's site.
Unfortunately this is presently blocked on getting a subdomain. [2]

* Provided a patch to move stem's controller exceptions to the top
level namespace. [3]

* Fix for the repurpose_circuit() integ test [4] and discovered an
issue with the stem.process test. [5]

Eoin

* Submitted a great patch overhauling and expanding verification of
server descriptor content. [6]

* Caught a possible tor bug related to 'GETINFO orconn-status' queries
when disconnected. [7]

* Numerous spelling fixes [8] and caught an issue with respect to how
the descriptor reader handles archives. [9]

Sean

* Reviewed my event parsing branch, offering feedback [10] and
catching a bug where STREAM events could have a zero port. [11]

* Submitted patches to add close_circuit() to the Controller [12] and
a setup.py [13]. The former led to a discussion about stem's licensing
and copyright for patches.

* Helped resolve an issue with EXTENDCIRCUIT where we weren't taking
into account when the path was optional or not. [14]

Other things I did this month includes...

* Preparation for the 2013 Outreach Program for Women [15], the
application deadline for which is now only two days away. This mostly
involved helping others add their project ideas to the volunteer page
and adding one of my own. [16]

* Made a landing page for stem's bug tracking [17] and linked to it
from stem's site.

* Revamped stem's enum documentation to be both more readable and
support interlinking. [18]

* Provided a code review for Karsten's pygeodate.py. [19]

* Answered a handful of controller inquiries on our lists. Stem's now
at a point where I don't mind suggesting it to developers. If you're
scripting or writing an application around tor then please give stem a
try! I'd love to get more feedback on where its rough edges are before
we make an initial release. [20][21][22][23]

Cheers! -Damian

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/7328
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/7324
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/6357
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/7259
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/7284
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/5810
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/7558
[8] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/2a59741
[9] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/69c55ab
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/7328#comment:3
[11] https://trac.torproject.org/7598
[12] https://trac.torproject.org/7566
[13] https://trac.torproject.org/7565
[14] https://trac.torproject.org/6666
[15] https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
[16] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#stemUsability
[17] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/stem/bugs
[18] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/0e99a26
[19] https://trac.torproject.org/6471
[20] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-November/001774.html
[21] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-November/026299.html
[22] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-November/004162.html
[23] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-November/004195.html