[tor-dev] Tor Metrics project - past, present, future

[Karsten Loesing]

On 12/18/13 4:57 PM, Damian Johnson wrote:
>> Last, but certainly not least, I have a couple of things in mind that we
>> might like in the *future*.  It would be good to know which of these
>> things sound interesting to others, so I can direct my time on the most
>> popular features first:
> 
> Hi Karsten.

Hi Damian,

first of all, thanks for your feedback!

> I'm definitely a fan of #1.

#1 is "archive microdescriptors".  Great, adding a green sticker to it!

> Also, it's nowhere on your
> list but I love directions that *reduce* the number of things that we
> maintain rather than increase them.

Well, removed features had their own list containing three items.  Are
there more things that we should remove?

> We're still a long ways off from
> deprecating metric-lib (#8252), but doing that would give you less to
> maintain and hence more time to focus on the rest of Metrics.

I agree, it's still a long way until we can deprecate metrics-lib and
switch to stem.  And it's still a good plan, because I really like the
idea of people reviewing or even contributing metrics code.

However, my current strategy for reducing the amount of code to maintain
is to find others to write and maintain better user interfaces.  For
example, Onionoo is quite successful by providing status information
that other people write great websites for.  Similarly, my ongoing
changes to metrics-web will eventually allow people to write their own
metrics websites using statistics produced by metrics-web; and then I
want to replace the current metric website with somebody else's and only
provide the statistics.  But following this strategy, most of the code
that I maintain will still rely on metrics-lib.

In the next step we should talk about moving metrics-db, metrics-web, or
Onionoo to Python and stem.  But those are quite big projects, as we
learned with Pyonionoo, and we need to avoid sinking time into these
projects if we're not sure we're going to finish them.

All the best,
Karsten