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

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

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

We have finally released Tor Browser 13.0. I prepared that release, and 
writing its changelog took me a surprising amount of time. The changes 
it contains are numerous; we hope you enjoy them!
It's also the first release not to have Torbutton as a backend, and I've 
written a blog post about that [0].
In addition to that, in the first half of the month, I've been doing 
last-minute fixes, such as some preferences that we missed [1], a way to 
allow using Tor Browser with Tor set as a proxy but without connecting 
to the control port [2], fixed a build problem of Android that happened 
only with the release channel [3], and a few more.
Speaking of Android, I also helped to find a way to improve its building 
time when we run our reproducible builds [4].

Then, I worked a little to make the DLL blocklist file obey the portable 
mode [5]. We haven't merged my proposed MR because it relied on Win32 
APIs, but we might use std::filesystem instead to work around certain 
limitations. I haven't done that in the first place because Firefox used 
to disable it in libc++, but it has been enabled in Firefox 116, and we 
might do the same to our 115 ESR and revisit the patch.

Last week, we were at the Mullvad offices for a team meeting. It was a 
very productive week, and we've taken a lot of notes. We've already 
published a first draft [6], but we might have to go back to it and do 
some more formatting and add any missing information.

Finally, I've started hacking on Android because we want to bring the 
connection assist there as well.
My dream is to unify our code base and handle both desktop and Android. 
It helps feature parity, it reduces the maintenance time, and in case of 
bugs, we can fix them on all our platforms at once.
I'm not sure we'll do it for the front end eventually (there have been 
some discussions about that [7]), but even doing it only for the back 
end would be a great help.
I've already managed to hook up a Tor daemon to the TorProvider I worked 
on last Summer and also to plumb the creation of a lyrebird instance for 
the domain fronting proxy. So, I'd expect it to be feasible, even though 
it'll take a while to create a polished patch.

I plan to keep working on Android a little bit. I've done the first 
exploration because I implemented the desktop part, so I know very well, 
but I might pass it to someone else.
Then, I might go back to Mullvad Browser packaging changes.

Best,
Pier

[0] https://blog.torproject.org/torbutton-retired/
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41496
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42160
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40974
[4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/rbm/-/issues/40062
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42163
[6] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/team/-/wikis/Goteburg-2023-Meeting-Notes
[7] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41188