[tor-dev] Stem GSoC 2013

[Damian Johnson]

> Interesting idea, after some light tinkering today I managed to run it with
> stem onboard, I'm unsure how much patching this will need (or rather how
> much can be done), but I'm on it.

Thanks! Personally I'm not at all familiar with IronPython - what kind
of modifications do CPython apps usually need to run under it?

> After giving it some thought I've come up with a polished and hopefully even
> more appealing version of GSoC project.

This looks great! I'm especially looking forward to #8257 since it'll
let us improve our descriptor integ tests. Presently stem tests
against our cached descriptors which can take several test runs to be
populated (the tests are skipped if they're not around). Once we can
fetch descriptors directly we can change the test to check if the
*current* consensus is valid or not.

> Tutorials. Timewise I'm listing them as the last thing, mainly because I
> there's the least uncertainity involved, stem will (hopefully) undergo some
> changes and I (also hopefully) get much better at making the best out of the
> library.

Good idea.

> There is room for setting up and managing a relay, gathering statistics,
> I definitely want to push controller's potential further (the more I work on
> #8728 the more fascinated I am by possibilites enabled by manual circuit
> creation and stream attachment. :-) )

I'm not quite sure what you mean about gathering statistics but I'm
glad to hear that you want to make the manual circuit functionality
better. That's functionality that quite a few potential users, but
likely has a lot of room for improvement within stem.

> Something Windows-specific will be useful to go along with making stem
> IronPython enabled, there's a constant problem with lack of good curses
> counterpart on Win, so that would mean reaching for non standard module (I'm
> aware of pdcurses with python bindings floating around).

What are the disadvantages of PDCurses? When I last looked into the
various curses alternatives for Windows that looked to be the best
option, though that was years ago.

Looking forward to seeing the application in Melange! -Damian