Greetings wonderful world. January has been delightfully focused on a couple substantial feature branches that are now merged! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Descriptor Lazy Loading -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When reading descriptors without validation (which is now the default) Stem is 25-70% faster! https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-January/008211.html This is because we now parse descriptors fields on-demand. Just need a server descriptor's exit policy? That's all we'll bother reading. This is why the heavier the descriptor type the larger the benefit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unified Python 2/3 Codebase -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Foxboron Stem now has a unified python 2/3 codebase! https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14075 This means that Stem now runs directly with any version of python from 2.6 to 3.x. Prior to this Stem did a 2to3 export when you installed it to provide cross-version compatibility. For users, the benefit of Foxboron's overhaul is that python3 installation and test runs are now much, much quicker. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Beside these a few other noteworthy tasks were... * Nick had a handful of suggestions for testing improvements, neatest of which was to include the command to re-run just individual tests when we have a failure. (#14113) * Our port_usage() function always returned None. (#14046) * Proc connection resolution could fail on busy systems. (#14048) * Fixed how the 'strict' argument works with exit policies. (#14314) Cheers! -Damian