[tor-project] Marco's Monthly Status Report | November 2022

[msim]

Hi o/

Here's my monthly status report for November 2022.

Well, by monthly what I mean to say is since mid November :) - I had to take a short month and a half break since the start of October due to some other commitments, but I've been back since the 14th of November.

At the start of my return, my first goal was to migrate my work to get WebRTC building under MinGW to the latest alpha[0].

Then, in some spare time between builds, I started browsing some old tickets and decided to bug 25916, for which I created a merge request for[1], however after discussion it was decided that it would be better to expand the scope of this issue to include all environment variables that could influence sandboxing.

After migrating the WebRTC build-related code to the latest alpha, I started getting WebRTC to work. Previously, I used WebRTC samples/tests available online (from both Mozilla and the WebRTC GitHub pages), combined with some debugging tools to assess what was failing. During my short break, however, I was toying around with firefox and learning to test WebRTC with inbuilt tests. And so, to progress on getting WebRTC to work, I will now be using the inbuilt tests and fixing whatever's wrong with those to progress. So far, this has proved incredibly more efficient than my previous approach and has revealed that a handful of tests that were failing were purely related to preferences that we set as defaults.

Some metrics as far as WebRTC tests (currently under Linux x86_64 only) go:
At the beginning, there were 84779/84833 tests passing (54 failing tests).
Currently, there are 91331/91356 tests passing (25 failing, but considerably more being triggered)

For December, the main priority is to get all tests passing on linux and at least make decent progress on getting tests passing on Windows. This involves setting up a development environment on windows instead of just a testing environment, as I can't run mach tests without building on the same machine (unless anyone knows how to :) )

All the best!
Marco

[0]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/460
[1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/459