[tor-project] PieroV's Monthly Status Report, March 2023

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for March 2023.

At the end of February, I was trying to fix the issues about RLBox 
reproducibly. So, at the beginning of March, I started from there and 
managed to solve the problem.
As a result, we finally enabled RLBox in Tor Browser 12.5a4 [0].
I also sent a PR to the upstream project, and it is part of the latest 
WASI SDK release.

After that, I worked on the Tor Browser updater. I cleaned up a few 
macros and configuration options [2][3] first, and then I tried to split 
our updater patches to apply part of them also to the Base Browser part 
of the patchset [4].
They are part of the most delicate patches, so I needed to be extra 
careful. Therefore, I preferred reworking them while keeping the final 
diff as small as possible and postponing further improvements and 
refinements.
I also learned to set up a mock update server, which gave me more 
confidence that my patches were correct.

Then, I finally reviewed the msim's patches to make WebRTC buildable 
with MinGW [5]. He did an outstanding job on it.
Also, this allowed us to find that Firefox IPC mechanisms have some 
problems when built with MinGW [6][7]. I definitely enjoyed diving into 
the crash we had and analyzing its root causes.

Another task I had was checking the automatic outgoing connections in 
Base Browser and trying to block the remaining ones.

At the end of the month, I restarted refactoring the remaining code from 
torbutton.
While it has not been a standalone extension for many years, it kept 
living as an essential part of Tor Browser. However, we would like to 
modernize its code, drop all the XPCOM parts we can, and integrate it 
even more with the rest of our patches.
We started a few months ago by moving inside the same repository as the 
browser and deprecating torbutton.git. However, the most disruptive 
changes will have to wait at least for 13.0 because we are in an 
advanced stage of 12.5.
I expect to work on this in April since doing that before the next ESR 
update might make the transition easier. Then, we would like to start 
with the rebase on 115 when it reaches nighly, at the beginning of May.

Best,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40353
[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-libc/pull/399
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41647
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41657
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41668
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/460
[6] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41489
[7] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41683