[tor-project] PieroV's Monthly Status Report, August 2022

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for August 2022.

This month I worked mainly on the Tor Browser switch from 91.x ESR to 
102.x ESR.
At the beginning of the month, I continued reviewing the rebase I 
started at the end of July [0].

Then, I focused on updating our toolchains, which took me two weeks.
I first found some issues with rustc (the most problematic one was that 
it got stuck while compiling Firefox on Debian Jessie [1]; I resolved it 
by enabling jemalloc). I took the occasion to make rustc reuse the LLVM 
tools we have already been building instead of building them again to 
shorten the process [2].
Another massive change is that we use only Clang to build Windows 
binaries (almost: rustc needs to link libgcc, and NSIS has an assembly 
module that only GCC and MASM can compile) [3].

The next step was some maintenance on the existing code. I linted all 
our patches, thanks to which we found some minor fixes [4]. It was 
propedeutic to move tor-launcher and torbutton to the main Tor Browser 
patchset [5]. I have also started working on it but then stopped to fix 
the issues Richard found when auditing Firefox closed tickets.
In particular, this week, I have been analyzing new problems related to 
fingerprinting through fonts [6].

We are finally close to building the first Tor Browser alpha based on 
102.2 ESR (12.0a2) for desktop and Android, too!
Please, consider testing it and sending us feedback!

Thanks,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40730
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40591
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40592
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/29318 
and linked issues
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40012
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/348
[6] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41116