[tor-reports] Damian's Status Report - November 2015

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all! For years Nyx (aka arm) has done a neat trick where we
describe what torrc options do and how they're used. To do this
Nyx had its own cobbled together parser for tor's man page.
Clearly a hack, but it worked.

That was all well and good, but we could clearly do better and
now we have!

  https://stem.torproject.org/api/manual.html

Besides filling Nyx's needs the shiny new 'stem.manual' module
provides...

* Tor test coverage. This adds several integration tests to confirm
  tor can properly build a valid man page.

* Provides all Stem users with three methods for getting tor manual
  information...

  a. from_cache() - Retrieves information bundled with Stem. This is
     only as up to date as Stem itself, but the fastest and most
     reliable method.

  b. from_man() - Parses information from the local system by running
     'man tor'. Still fast, but obviously requires tor's man page to
     be present.

  c. from_remote() - Retrieves the latest manual information from
     tor's git repository. This is slow and shouldn't be used without
     a fallback, but provides the most up-to-date manual information.

* Along with tor's manual information we provide brief, more
  user-friendly descriptions of all tor's configuration options.

* Parser is much improved over Nyx's. In particular the stem.manual
  module has vastly improved performance, test coverage, and updated
  summary information.

Cheers! -Damian