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

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all. I spent most of August, like the prior month, traveling. This
time I attended Toorcamp [1] and went on vacation. Both were pleasant
and relaxing, but not terribly conducive to coding so I don't have
much to report...

* Descriptor CSV Export Functionality

Naif proposed export functionality for Tor server descriptors a while
back [1], which Eric and Megan took the first stab at [2]. I ended up
revising this quite a bit [4], but it turned out nicely.

* Caching Expansion and Test Prompt

Added caching for GETCONF and static GETINFO queries. I also added a
handy little script for a debugging interpretor. It kicks off Tor,
then provides an interactive python prompt with a controller instance
to it (optionally shutting Tor down afterward). Ravi code reviewed
these changes [5] and volunteered to do code reviews of my future work
as well.

* Consensus Parsing

Over the last few weeks Ravi's been working on a patch to parse
network status documents [6]. It's functional, but missing unit tests
and deviates from the parsing style and strict validation done for the
other descriptor types so I'm taking a turn with the code. Thus far
I'm done revising and adding tests for router status entries, and now
working on the document. Changes are available in the
'document-parsing' branch of my repo [7].

Parsing these documents is a far larger task than I thought
(especially if you include v2 documents and microdescriptors), so
working on this branch will probably keep me occupied for much of
September.

* Controller Expansion

Ravi has gone on a hacking binge, adding support for USEFEATURE [8],
SIGNAL [9], EXTENDCIRCUIT [10], and SETCIRCUITPURPOSE [11].

Cheers! -Damian

[1] http://www.toorcamp.org/
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/6171
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/6512
[4] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/7022021c4207a0066cb93261629f2ba020d307f6
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/6631
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/6569
[7] https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/atagar/stem.git/shortlog/refs/heads/document-parsing
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/6417
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/6659
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/6666
[11] https://trac.torproject.org/6670