[tor-dev] Brief state of sbws thoughts

[Matt Traudt]

Teor, Juga

There's a lot of things fighting for my attention right now, so you
might have noticed I've slowed way down on attending to sbws
tickets/PRs/etc. I think time will free up in the next few days.

I think sbws is in a very good place code-wise right now. I don't think
much more **has** to be done to the code. Even though I enjoy adding
things like the state file (GHPR#236 [2]), I don't think that was a good
use of my time.

It looks like there's a lot of check boxes Juga has made regarding
making a Debian package[0]. Those should get checked. These are important.

However, I think the absolute most important thing for us to be spending
our time on right now is deciding what "good" results are and verifying
sbws produces "good" results.

To accomplish this, I think one of the two suggestions I made in a
comment on GH#182 [1] (quoted here) is what we should be doing.

1. Run torflow and sbws side-by-side (but not at the same time) to
remove more variables. This has the added benefit of us having access to
the raw scanner results from torflow before it does whatever magic
scaling it does. OR

2. Ask for access to raw scanner results from someone running torflow.

I fear sbws is doomed to die the death of the new bandwidth scanners
before it if we don't start seriously verifying sbws is "good" or if I
personally slowly stop working/coordinating work on it.

Thanks

Matt

[0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26848
[1]:
https://github.com/pastly/simple-bw-scanner/issues/182#issuecomment-404250053
[2]: https://github.com/pastly/simple-bw-scanner/pull/236