[tor-talk] Tor 0.3.1.5-alpha is released!

[Nick Mathewson]

Hi, all!

There's a new alpha Tor release available!  The source is available
from the "download" page on the website on the website, and packages
should be available before long. The Tor Browser team expects to get a
release out early next week.

This is an alpha release: if you aren't up for finding and reporting
bugs, you should stick with a stable release series.

As usual, I'll be sending alpha announcements here, and stable
announcements to tor-announce.

Please test these alpha releases if you *can* report bugs: we want to
have all the bugs squashed before 0.3.1.x is finally declared stable.

Finally, this release also marks the end of support for the Tor
0.2.4.x, 0.2.6.x, and 0.2.7.x release series. Those releases will
receive no further bug or security fixes. Anyone still running or
distributing one of those versions should upgrade.


Changes in version 0.3.1.5-alpha - 2017-08-01
  Tor 0.3.1.5-alpha improves the performance of consensus diff
  calculation, fixes a crash bug on older versions of OpenBSD, and fixes
  several other bugs. If no serious bugs are found in this version, the
  next version will be a release candidate.

  o Major features (build system, continuous integration):
    - Tor's repository now includes a Travis Continuous Integration (CI)
      configuration file (.travis.yml). This is meant to help new
      developers and contributors who fork Tor to a Github repository be
      better able to test their changes, and understand what we expect
      to pass. To use this new build feature, you must fork Tor to your
      Github account, then go into the "Integrations" menu in the
      repository settings for your fork and enable Travis, then push
      your changes. Closes ticket 22636.

  o Major bugfixes (openbsd, denial-of-service):
    - Avoid an assertion failure bug affecting our implementation of
      inet_pton(AF_INET6) on certain OpenBSD systems whose strtol()
      handling of "0xfoo" differs from what we had expected. Fixes bug
      22789; bugfix on 0.2.3.8-alpha. Also tracked as TROVE-2017-007.

  o Major bugfixes (relay, performance):
    - Perform circuit handshake operations at a higher priority than we
      use for consensus diff creation and compression. This should
      prevent circuits from starving when a relay or bridge receives a
      new consensus, especially on lower-powered machines. Fixes bug
      22883; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.

  o Minor features (bridge authority):
    - Add "fingerprint" lines to the networkstatus-bridges file produced
      by bridge authorities. Closes ticket 22207.

  o Minor features (directory cache, consensus diff):
    - Add a new MaxConsensusAgeForDiffs option to allow directory cache
      operators with low-resource environments to adjust the number of
      consensuses they'll store and generate diffs from. Most cache
      operators should leave it unchanged. Helps to work around
      bug 22883.

  o Minor features (geoip):
    - Update geoip and geoip6 to the July 4 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2
      Country database.

  o Minor features (relay, performance):
    - Always start relays with at least two worker threads, to prevent
      priority inversion on slow tasks. Part of the fix for bug 22883.
    - Allow background work to be queued with different priorities, so
      that a big pile of slow low-priority jobs will not starve out
      higher priority jobs. This lays the groundwork for a fix for
      bug 22883.

  o Minor bugfixes (build system, rust):
    - Fix a problem where Rust toolchains were not being found when
      building without --enable-cargo-online-mode, due to setting the
      $HOME environment variable instead of $CARGO_HOME. Fixes bug
      22830; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha. Fix by Chelsea Komlo.

  o Minor bugfixes (compatibility, zstd):
    - Write zstd epilogues correctly when the epilogue requires
      reallocation of the output buffer, even with zstd 1.3.0.
      (Previously, we worked on 1.2.0 and failed with 1.3.0). Fixes bug
      22927; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (compilation warnings):
    - Suppress -Wdouble-promotion warnings with clang 4.0. Fixes bug
      22915; bugfix on 0.2.8.1-alpha.
    - Fix warnings when building with libscrypt and openssl scrypt
      support on Clang. Fixes bug 22916; bugfix on 0.2.7.2-alpha.
    - Compile correctly when both openssl 1.1.0 and libscrypt are
      detected. Previously this would cause an error. Fixes bug 22892;
      bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.
    - When building with certain versions of the mingw C header files,
      avoid float-conversion warnings when calling the C functions
      isfinite(), isnan(), and signbit(). Fixes bug 22801; bugfix
      on 0.2.8.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (coverity build support):
    - Avoid Coverity build warnings related to our BUG() macro. By
      default, Coverity treats BUG() as the Linux kernel does: an
      instant abort(). We need to override that so our BUG() macro
      doesn't prevent Coverity from analyzing functions that use it.
      Fixes bug 23030; bugfix on 0.2.9.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (directory authority):
    - When a directory authority rejects a descriptor or extrainfo with
      a given digest, mark that digest as undownloadable, so that we do
      not attempt to download it again over and over. We previously
      tried to avoid downloading such descriptors by other means, but we
      didn't notice if we accidentally downloaded one anyway. This
      behavior became problematic in 0.2.7.2-alpha, when authorities
      began pinning Ed25519 keys. Fixes bug 22349; bugfix
      on 0.2.1.19-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (error reporting, windows):
    - When formatting Windows error messages, use the English format to
      avoid codepage issues. Fixes bug 22520; bugfix on 0.1.2.8-alpha.
      Patch from "Vort".

  o Minor bugfixes (file limits, osx):
    - When setting the maximum number of connections allowed by the OS,
      always allow some extra file descriptors for other files. Fixes
      bug 22797; bugfix on 0.2.0.10-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (linux seccomp2 sandbox):
    - Avoid a sandbox failure when trying to re-bind to a socket and
      mark it as IPv6-only. Fixes bug 20247; bugfix on 0.2.5.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (memory leaks):
    - Fix a small memory leak when validating a configuration that uses
      two or more AF_UNIX sockets for the same port type. Fixes bug
      23053; bugfix on 0.2.6.3-alpha. This is CID 1415725.

  o Minor bugfixes (unit tests):
    - test_consdiff_base64cmp would fail on OS X because while OS X
      follows the standard of (less than zero/zero/greater than zero),
      it doesn't follow the convention of (-1/0/+1). Make the test
      comply with the standard. Fixes bug 22870; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.
    - Fix a memory leak in the link-handshake/certs_ok_ed25519 test.
      Fixes bug 22803; bugfix on 0.3.0.1-alpha.