[tor-dev] Nick's August 2012 status report

[Nick Mathewson]

THINGS I DID IN AUGUST

I spent a few days vacationing with my family in Maine; took a day off
for my birthday, and generally chilled out.

I merged lots of bugfixes and patches -- some mine, some other people's,
some requiring rewriting and review, some not.  This included some
security-related stuff that lost me a little sleep.  It also involved
hacking on some neat patches from Stewart Smith (with help from Jim
Meyering) to revamp our build system. We put out a new 0.2.2.

I fixed the more important (fixable) bugs in 0.2.3 (notably 6507 and
6244 and 6404), and pushed back on some others. IMO we're now ready to release
the (probably) last 0.2.3.x-rc.

I merged more patches into 0.2.4; see the new changes files there for
more info.  Lots of these were ipv6-related stuff from Linus.

I started a draft for BEGIN2 cells so I can try to get a more
future-proof IPv6 protocol implementation.  This is blocked while I
teach myself how DNSSEC works once and for all.

I tried to get a little more testing on alternatives to our current (bogus,
deteriorating) geoip supplier (see #6266) but didn't get anything beyond
my older inconclusive results.

I started working on an implementation for proposal 200, and a revised
202.

With help from some libevent users, I fixed an SSL bug that might have
been one of the (probably several) things making SSL bufferevents
unstable.  The fix appears in libevent 2.0.20-stable.

I agreed to fly out to SF to accept the EFF's pioneer awards on Tor's
behalf.

I had an anniversary and a birthday.

I proposed a crazy idea about a separate 0.2.3.x branch for DAs.

I chatted a little about metaformats, and spent a while catching up on
the ones I didn't know the details of. Currently I'm thinking YAML is a
hot mess, and ProtocolBuffers is not too bad actually.

There was this insane stegotorus bug that I sort of tracked down.  That
is, I can tell you which libevent commit to revert in order to make the
problem go away (that is, 3467f2fa3bbff0dab6865), but I can't for the
life of me figure out what's wrong with it. My current guess is that it
provokes an issue somewhere else.

A couple of friends/acquaintances approached me about working for Tor as
a project manager. I told them to email jobs at torproject.org.  I don't
think we've heard from them yet.

It would rock if we had a faster release schedule.  I've been trying to
find projects our size that do it right.


This coming month I must help Linus get our September IPv6 deliverables
deployed.  I need to help Andrea get her refactored channel abstraction
merged, and make sure she's got more stuff to do (and more interesting
stuff to do!) as she transitions to full-time.  I must get that blog
post I'm cowriting with Steven finished, and our paper for November
started.  And I need to write some of my own code too.

I also need to finalize a plan and a schedule for 0.2.4 and send them to
the world.


"when in danger or in doubt,"
-- 
Nick