Between the normal October hubbub of baking peanut butter cookies and Halloween (the spiffiest US holiday, imho) I’ve been hacking a fair bit on our python projects.
Arm is now in maintenance mode, but has been getting plenty of love…
- Thanks to Carlo Strub arm now has a FreeBSD port!
- Sebastian and Robert spotted a couple substantial issues ([1], [2]), now fixed
- Jordi Espasa Clofent generously lent me an OpenBSD vm for arm testing. I fixed the issues that I could ([1], [2], [3]), but there’s still a couple bad ones outstanding…
- The control connection gets intermittent interrupt signals while arm starts. This one has me completely stumped. Wherever this fun-loving gremlin lives it’s deeper than I’d care to go (maybe a vm issue, OpenBSD quirk, or it’s just a conscientious objector of localhost socket connection – who knows).
- The uptime attribute for OpenBSD’s variant of ps is… er, difficult to parse. It’s in local time, has am/pm rather than being 24-hour time, and the whole format changes based on if the uptime is over a day or not. This whole platform has been scientifically designed to get on my nerves…
My main focus, however, has been on Stem. I’ve finished the ControlMessage class, a counterpart for TorCtl’s core sendAndRecv functionality which handles the base control protocol message parsing. From here it’ll be easy to implement counterparts for most of TorCtl’s functions (get_info, get/set_conf, etc), but that’s not really a high priority. Only a small fraction of my time has been spent working on the stem library – much more has been spent on the documentation and unit/integration testing which is what’ll give this library its worth. Besides being developer friendly and well tested, this will let us check when cutting new Tor releases if its changes will cause issues for stem’s users or not. I’ve also submitted a TorCtl change to take advantage of this but it’s looking kinda unlike that will happen.
At present the stem integration tests are a good basic verification test for Tor’s controller functionality, and will become better as I expand stem. If we become interested in testing for Tor then this will also give a very good starting point for writing those. However, while I’m happy to help with Tor testing I’m also tired of working alone on things that only I care about. If we expand testing to focus more on Tor then someone else will need to take a lead there.
Besides development, I did a code review for Tom’s torperf changes and attended the GSoC Mentor Summit where I met Mitar Milutinovic, David Fifield, the Umit developers, and took part in a counter-censorship discussion. We should follow up with Rodolfo Carvalho who’s developing Open Monitor (they have a skill set we lack and vice versa), but that’s up to others. From irc it sounds like we’re too overloaded right now to mentor for Google Code In – pity but maybe next year.
All in all a great month.