[tor-dev] [tor-assistants] Finding a maintainer for Weather

[Justin Findlay]

Hi, I have recently begun looking to volunteer development time to Tor, 
and when I stated this on #tor-dev, it was suggested among other things 
that I look at maintaining Weather.  I have been reading through the 
code and looked at some of the tickets, but haven't made any fixes yet.

On 10/23/2013 10:02 AM, Damian Johnson wrote:
>>> Actually, DocTor rather than Weather - I want to shut Weather down. 
>> Okay, I guess that's just a question of scope. The old Java DocTor 
>> was only a consensus-health checker written for directory authority 
>> operators. If you want to extend scope to relay operators, sure, why 
>> not. 
> Gotcha. I've defined DocTor's scope as 'notifications based on the 
> ongoing collection of present descriptor data', which overlaps with 
> Weather (minus a website for opt-ins). DocTor has already grown a tad 
> larger than just consensus-health since it now includes checks for 
> descriptor validity and sybil attacks.
So, it seems that the desire is to replace whatever services Weather was 
supplying with increased DocTor robustness.  In this case, then, what is 
the time scale for migration?  I suppose I could still volunteer my 
maintainer services (watever they are) for Weather maintenance until its 
end, although I must say that I've never worked in an OSS project before 
and claim gross newbie ignorance and immaturity.

In particular, I'm not sure what a maintainer of Weather would do in 
this scenario.  Am I just generally available for indefinite whatever, 
or am I actively working through bug tickets, trying to resolve them and 
pushing fixes to the site?

Also, seperate from and previous to my Weather proclivities, upon 
encountering this page

https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Coding

I was intrigued by project a. PyDoctor, which '[is] about rewriting 
DocTor in Python'.  So if DocTor is undergoing active development now, 
is this project idea now retracted?

I have no preference on the items I have discussed, and I am greatly 
interested in making Tor better in the most effective way I can, but I 
would appreciate a little guidance in doing so, at least for now.  Thanks.


Justin