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

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

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

At the beginning of the month, we of the application team released Tor 
Browser 12.0 stable. So, in the first week, I worked on some last-minute 
changes (such as some migration code to remove old language packs [0]), 
and I helped to release the 12.0.

Then, I started migrating the remaining torbutton code from its 
dedicated repository to tor-browser.git [1]. We plan to refactor all 
this code and to better integrate it with the rest of the patch set.
And we started with the localization files: previously, we kept them in 
torbutton.git, and we ran a script to update them at each release.
Now, we keep only English in tor-browser.git, and the rest of the files 
are injected during the build. As a result, nightly builds will always 
have the latest and most updated translations [2].
While doing these changes, we also cleaned unused strings [3] and 
migrated the localization files from Transifex to Weblate, and I helped 
emmapeel with this.

Another task I worked on was improving the patch that makes Tor Browser 
portable. In particular, my previous refactor of this patch still 
deleted some code that could be helpful when the standalone mode was not 
enabled. Some users asked us to improve this patch long ago [4].

Then, I wrote a patch for our toolchain to make it able to build the 
WASI sandbox and include it in Tor Browser [5]. The patch is still under 
review, so it was not included in 12.5a1.

Finally, I helped prepare and build the first alpha from the 12.5 series.

Best,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41435
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41478
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40679
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41375
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/20497
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40353