Ducks are awesome. Especially cute Indian Runners who waddle about upright like penguins. Besides this startling discovery, in April I wrote some code, released some code, and did a bunch of GSoC mentor/administration work.
Stem had a reasonably good month. Work included…
- Finished and merged all of the outstanding todo items from my discussions with Karsten (merge diff). This included additional testing, support for bridge descriptors, re-discovering a tor bug that caused negative uptimes, and a variety of other things. I’m keeping an eye on metrics-lib tickets as they roll in so stem can improve from the issues that Karsten discovers (example), and discussion is ongoing about the addition of a descriptor header field.
- Discussed stem’s copyright with Wendy and others. We now have a plan for contributors that’ll allow us to reuse stem code under other licenses when needed.
- Ongoing discussions with Beck about potential stem projects. He sounds eager to work with Ravi and me on the general controller.
- The whitespace conventions of my projects drive you guys nuts just as badly as yours annoy me. This was gonna be a continued pain point for accepting contributions from others so I’ve added a whitespace checker to stem’s tests that’ll yell at people if they start doing something funky.
- Stole a trick from git and dropped the ‘–no-color’ argument from the test runner in favor of autodetecting if stdout is a tty terminal or not. This means that test output to your console will have pretty colors, but the ANSI escape sequences will be omitted if you’re piping the output to something else (less, a file, etc).
- Merged a chroot testing target so we can ensure that stem plays nicely with those environments. This is a use case that traditionally causes problems for our controllers since they don’t account for a path prefix in cookie authentication, determining the data directory, etc.
- More intermittent concurrency woes. Hopefully I fixed it for realz this time!
Arm also got some love, including a couple important fixes which were released in version 1.4.5…
- Fix for unrecognized authentication methods. I also filed a ticket with the fix for TorCtl which got a less-than-heartwarming thanks.
- Added a notice when ptrace is disabled, which by extension causes some proc contents to only be readable by root (breaking arm’s connection panel). Only Jake has expressed an opinion that this is a good feature to have, but others don’t seem interested in discussing it so guess it’s something that I’ll just need to work around. The message tells users how to disable the feature and cites the ticket if they want to know more.
- Helped arm users including Eric, LoneWolf, and MoPac.
Finally, I spent a good chunk of this month cat herding for GSoC. We survived the student selection process (yay!) and for the moment at least things are proceeding smoothly. Thanks to Sebastian for leading the student selection meeting and covering for the #gsoc deduplication discussions.
Cheers! -Damian
PS. The aforementioned ducks are in reference to an email thread dispensing free flightless avian waterfowl to the masses. Alas though, I couldn’t get any since my small apartment isn’t especially duck-friendly. *sob*