[tor-talk] GSOC Ideas.

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 07:50:06AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> > Exporting to CSV based of of the filters is an easy task. Is there
> > anyone else who would find this useful? If so I'll look into making a
> > PHP script that can do that right now. :)
> 
> The odds of Tor picking a GSoC student to improve TorStatus are non-zero,
> but low.  (To be precise, I wouldn't mentor that project, but I don't know
> if somebody else would.)
> 
> The better approach for providing Tor network status information is to
> extend the metrics website, mostly because the metrics website is
> maintained whereas the TorStatus website isn't.  Kevin Berry, one of our
> last year's GSoC students who I mentored, started working on a basic
> network status page here:
> 
>   https://metrics.torproject.org/networkstatus.html
> 
> The code for the metrics website is here, and yes, it's JSP/servlets:
> 
>   http://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git
> 
> Please let me know if you have further questions.

That said, I think changing the Torstatus PHP script so it uses the
metrics database as its back-end, and cleaning up the PHP part of it,
would still be a very valuable task.

Right now Torstatus has two components: the PHP interface front-end,
and the database back-end that remembers stuff about the network so it
can (for example) make historical bandwidth graphs.

The database kept by the metrics project is probably better than the
database kept by Torstatus. So dropping the db side of torstatus, and
teaching it to use the db from metrics, would be valuable in that it
would make things more maintainable.

The front-end from Torstatus is currently more usable, and thus more
useful, than the front-end on the metrics project. Karsten would like
somebody to fix the metrics side so it's better, and then we can dump
Torstatus. That would be great, if it happens, but until it happens,
making Torstatus better would still be useful.

The problem is that there are basically no Torstatus developers in
the world, so working on that as a GSoC project would be hard since we
wouldn't have anybody to mentor you.

But if somebody wants to pick it up as a side hobby, that'd be great. :)

--Roger