[tor-dev] Stem Release 1.3

[Damian Johnson]

Greetings wonderful people of the world! After months down in the engine
room I'm delighted to announce the 1.3.0 release of Stem.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Stem is a Python library for
interacting with Tor. With it you can script against your relay,
descriptor data, or even write applications similar to arm and Vidalia.

  https://stem.torproject.org/

So what's new in this release?

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Better Hidden Service Support
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Now it's easier than ever to spin up hidden services!

Thanks to contributions from Federico Ceratto and Patrick O'Doherty we now
have a set of methods specifically for working with hidden services. Check
it out in our new tutorial...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/over_the_river.html

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Faster Descriptor Parsing
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This release dramatically improves the speed at which Stem can parse
decriptors. Thanks to optimizations from Nick Mathewson and Ossi Herrala
we can now read descriptors 40% faster!

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This is just the tip of the iceberg. For a full rundown on the myriad of
improvements and fixes in this release see...

  https://stem.torproject.org/change_log.html#version-1-3

Cheers! -Damian