[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - July 2013

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all. This month was mostly spent on non-tor work including a server
migration, bad service outage at work, and a full week of cleaning my
apartment. Still, plenty of spiffy news in stem land...

======================================================================
Remote Descriptor Fetching
======================================================================

Major feature for this month was the addition of a module to remotely
fetch tor descriptors...

https://stem.torproject.org/api/descriptor/remote.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005156.html

This works much like tor itself does, downloading descriptor content
from directory authorities and mirrors. With it we can now easily script
against the present state of the tor network without piggybacking on a
live tor instance.

Curious what you can use it for? See our present monitors for some ideas...

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005209.html
https://gitweb.torproject.org/atagar/tor-utils.git/tree

This also included a little work with Nick on the spec and tor side...

* Dropped the unimplemented microdescriptor query from the spec. (#9271)

* Noting the max queryable fingerprints/hashes in spec. (#9282)

* We're getting a high failure rate on the downloads we make. A little
  more investigation is needed on my part to help narrow this down. (#9379)

======================================================================

Other news includes...

* Revised the appearance of stem's frontpage. The blue buttons were pretty
  jarring, so switched to something that matches the rest of the page...

  http://www.atagar.com/transfer/stem_frontpage/before.png
  http://www.atagar.com/transfer/stem_frontpage/after.png

* Added Slackware to our download page. Many thanks to Markus for adding us
  to SlackBuilds!

  http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.0/python/stem/

* Worked with Sreenatha to port Tor Weather to stem. Unfortunately Weather
  does not presently have an active maintainer so I'm not sure how we will
  proceed on this front. (#8264)

  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005111.html

* The Munich dev meeting has attracted quite a few potential volunteers. After
  discussing prospective projects with seros I tidied up our volunteer page.
  Changes included...

  * Added Christian's Globe project
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-August/060124.html

  * Dropped Thandy
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-July/059830.html

  * Merged TorStatus into the entry for Atlas
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-July/060003.html

  * General page corrections
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-August/060125.html

* Our automated Jenkins test runs ran into another regression in tor that
  caused it to segfault. (#9298)

* STREAM events mishandled IPv6 addresses. (caught and patched by soult, #9181)

* Thread with Pierre about TorPylle which turned into a discussion with Nick
  regarding future language direction for the tor codebase. I'm looking
  forward to seeing where it goes!

  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005161.html

* We just finished with midterms for Google Summer of Code. Chang
  unfortunately did not pass, but the other projects are going well.

* Sorted out travel arrangements for the GSoC mentor summit. Nick and I will
  be going, and Moritz is presently on the waitlist.

* Code reviewed ra's rttprober. He provided some great feedback for which I
  still owe him a reply.

  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005183.html

Cheers! -Damian