[tor-project] PieroV's monthly status report

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
This is my status report for December 2021.

I started on December 1st as a developer on the Applications team.
Initially, I spent some time learning how the projects are organized and 
how to build Tor Browser.

Then, I started looking at a crash of Tor Browser on Windows 
(tor-browser#40721).
To do so, I found a workaround to add xul.pdb to the installer (see 
tor-browser-build#31546) and added what I found on the wiki page about 
debugging Tor Browser on Windows. We can now debug on Windows with 
source code rather than relying on the disassembly.
Eventually, reverting one of Mozilla's patches solved this issue, 
tor-browser#40698, tor-browser#40706, and we could roll 
tor-browser-build#40389 back.
Mozilla is investigating this problem further.

I also had a look at font problems on Ubuntu and Fedora.
It was a regression of Firefox bug #1661532, combined with a new Firefox 
anti-tracking feature added between versions 78 and 91.
We worked on a patch with Mozilla (Bugzilla#1745715), which solved 
tor-browser#40685 and tor-browser-build#40387.

My next task was reorganizing the Tor Browser patch set (tor-browser#40562).
We wanted to reorganize patches to make Tor Browser work after a small 
number of patches and make git bisect easier.
I proposed some changes and discussed them with GeKo and Richard. I am 
pushing a reorganized branch either later today or in the next few days.

Finally, my last task was looking at the automatic tests, which have 
been broken for a while.
They work with a manual setup of a Python 2 virtual env (as described in 
my comments on tor-browser-bundle-testsuite#40033).
Tor Browser 11 passes most of them. Some others need to be updated, and 
some just fail. Before the holidays, I was investigating the latter ones.

Thanks, and I wish you a happy new year!
Pier