Once again my month’s been split between GSoC and arm. The former’s been a quite juggling act (especially the admin role), but well worth it. When the dust settled arm got a fantastic student. Kamran Khan will be hacking on arm this summer, working on several enhancement including manual path selection, UPnP support, a newnym option, and best of all a GTK front end.
In other news, this month started with the 1.4.2 arm release followed by hotfixes and improvements to its deb. Thanks to Dererk, TorCtl has been properly packaged for Debian as python-torctl and arm uses this (rather than a bundled copy) for its debs. This release also had metadata fixes suggested by intrigeri (debian bugs 623311 and 623312).
Thanks both to Sebastian and my new team of git-fanatics at Amazon, arm has finally migrated to git. Besides some workarounds for svn:externals and ‘svn export’ this has been a painless transition and I’m definitely glad I made the move.
As for arm development, this month has included several notable fixes, performance improvements, and cleaning of the codebase…
- Improved arm’s startup time by 83% (from 0.84 seconds to 0.14).
- Thanks to Erinn and Andrew I finally have access to a Mac. PID resolution and several important issues for arm on that platform have been fixed.
- The deprecated connection panel and file descriptor popup have been dropped from the codebase (together over 1500 lines).
- Fixed a critical parsing error for circuit paths in older Tor versions thanks to asn.
- Investigated the work needed for Windows compatibility and process renaming. Unfortunately neither are likely to happen any time soon.
- … and many more (file descriptor warnings, using new ‘traffic/*’ getinfo options, etc).