[tor-dev] Proc Unit Testing & Next Project

[Erik I Islo]

Damian,

After talking about it with Professor Danner, we would like to stick
with the Tor Descriptors prject rather than work on Onionoo.
Professor Danner brought up that if this project isn't maintained, our
work could be fruitless, and at this point we would prefer to stick
with Python. We would, however, be possibly willing to move on to
Onionoo after finishing the descriptor exporter if time in our
internship permits.

On another note, we came up with a couple more questions:

- What environment did you want the proc unit tests run under in
Windows.  Since Cygwin only supports up to python 2.6 currently, we
would need to rebuild python (2.7) in order to allow the tests to run.
 Under the vanilla windows command prompt, we need to have an instance
of tor already running on the computer.  Generally speaking, we don't
have much access to windows development machines, so any advice you
have would be appreciated.

- For writing integration tests for proc, we aren't sure how to test
get_memory_usage(), get_stats(), and get_connections().  These
functions all return information that can really only be checked (so
far as we can tell) by parsing the proc files to extract the same
information in an identical manner to the functions themselves.
Furthermore, given how rapidly this information is changing, it will
likely be an issue that in the time between getting the needed memory
usage, for example, and the actual call on get_memory_usage(), the
amount of memory tor is using could easily have changed.  Could you
give us some pointers on how we should approach these integration
tests?

Thank you in advance,
Erik & Megan

On 6/25/12, Erik I Islo <eislo at wesleyan.edu> wrote:
> Hi Damian,
>
> Megan and I have finished a first run at writing unit tests for the proc
> utilities in stem.  The code may be found on Megan's Github at:
> https://github.com/meganchang/Stem/blob/proc-tests/test/unit/util/proc.py.
> Until we hear back on a code review, we'll move on to the integration
> tests.  Just for reference, here is a link to the ticket as well:
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6082.
>
> Looking further into the future, we discussed our next project with Stem
> with Professor Danner today, and agreed that the "Export Tor Desciptors"
> project would be ideal.  (
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6171)  Do you have any
> thoughts on this?  Otherwise, we just wanted to let you know our plan as we
> move forward.
>
> -Erik & Megan
>