[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - February 2014

[Damian Johnson]

It was great meeting everyone in Reykjavík! February largely went toward GSoC
prep. Thanks to everybody that sent me project ideas!

  https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-google-summer-code-2014

This left a lot less time than I'd like for coding. The only noteworthy
changes this month were...

* Added a new 'stem.util.test_tools' module for easily running Pyflakes and
  PEP8 checks...

  https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/blob/HEAD:/stem/util/test_tools.py

  Stem, ExitMap, and arm all do these checks as part of their tests so this
  let them shed quite a bit of boilerplate.

  Want these checks for your own project? It's easy, so give it a try!

  https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/atagar/exitmap.git/blob/HEAD:/run_tests.py

* Stem tutorial example for checking the Tor exits you're using for your
  connections...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/to_russia_with_love.html#determine-the-exit-you-re-using

* Couple new Controller methods for checking where Tor is listening for
  connections of a given type...

  https://stem.torproject.org/api/control.html#stem.control.Listener
  https://stem.torproject.org/api/control.html#stem.control.Controller.get_ports
  https://stem.torproject.org/api/control.html#stem.control.Controller.get_listeners

  >>> for listener_type in stem.control.Listener:
  ...   ports = map(str, controller.get_ports(listener_type))
  ...   print "%s ports: %s" % (listener_type, ', '.join(ports))
  ...
  OR ports:
  DIR ports:
  SOCKS ports: 9050
  TRANS ports:
  NATD ports:
  DNS ports:
  CONTROL ports: 2779

* Gave Sphinx's aafig module a try to see if it could improve our API
  overviews...

  https://www.atagar.com/transfer/stem/overview_before.png
  https://www.atagar.com/transfer/stem/overview_after.png

  In the end I decided against it since this doesn't add much, and it causes
  us to render the overview as a svg (so users can't copy/paste function
  names).

* Sent Philipp some improvements for ExitMap...

  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-February/006162.html

Cheers! -Damian