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

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

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

For most of the month, I kept working on the connection assist for Android.
I wrote some quick styling for about:torconnect to make it appear like 
the native UI we are still implementing.
I also wrote a gating mechanism Claire used to write an opt-in UI for 
the latest TBA alpha.
While working on this, I also found that the Onion Location setting 
wasn't persisted [0], and I wrote a fix.
All this work went into the 13.5a3 alpha. Richard wrote a great blog 
post [1] with more information about that.

In addition to that, I worked on quicker tasks, such as:
- Preparing the 13.0.7 releases and rebasing the alpha branches.
- Resizing all the wordmarks to the same size to address 
fingerprintability of nightly vs. alpha [2].
- Enabling GeckoDriver on all desktop platforms and including it in the 
released artifacts [3].
- Using LLD on all Linux platforms, re-enabling debug symbols for Linux 
i686 [4], and improving the format of our debug symbol archives [5].
- Use Go 1.20 on Windows to restore Windows 7 compatibility on pluggable 
transports [6].

Best,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42324
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-alpha-release-tor-browser-135a3/
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42319
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42337
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42146
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41046
[6] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42179