Hi all. This June I exchanged my developer hat to be a mentor instead, spending more time reviewing code than writing it myself. Fingers crossed that at least one or two of them stick around after the summer ends!

As such, this status report is more about other people than me. Apologies if I miss anything.

* Ravi (GSoC Student)

This month Ravi discovered a bug with Tor's GETCONF method [1] and wrote numerous features including SAFECOOKIE support [2] and a GETCONF method for the controller [3]. The GETCONF handling is complicated by the accursed HiddenServiceOptions so it has needed several iterations, but I plan to merge it this week. After that Ravi already has two more feature branches lined up for me to review (*sob*)...

* Beck (Volunteer)

Somehow I've never been able to bring myself to do development on Windows (if you haven't seen Neal Stephenson's Hole Hawg article then I recommend it [4]). Fortunately Beck does, and has done a fantastic job of fixing stem and its tests to work there [5][6]. He also added get_version(), authenticate(), and protocolinfo() methods to the controller.

* Erik and Megan (Wesleyan Students)

Erik and Megan have been focusing on stem's tests, first submitting a couple fixes for the mocking module [7][8] then writing unit and integration tests for the proc utilities [9]. Next they plan to implement the CSV export functionality suggested by naif [10].

* Sathyanarayanan (Volunteer)

Though work has kept him pretty occupied, Sathyanarayanan has been working on an ExitPolicy class [11] and is presently at the dev meeting making plans to implement a python based Onionoo.

* Karsten

Though he isn't hacking on stem itself, Karsten has been helping by reviewing its descriptor handling and suggesting improvements [12][13].

Besides those, I implemented a few stem improvements too this month...

* Sphinx Documentation

At the start of June I rewrote stem's documentation into reStructuredText so it could be compiled by Sphinx. The results are very pretty... http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/stem_html_12_06_05/

* Python 2.5 Compatibility

Stem aims to support python versions 2.5 and above (in the 2.x series). However, most of our development has been on 2.7, letting backward incompatible changes slip in inadvertently. This ended up being a two week bug fixing odyssey, but now that it's done stem and its tests should now work if users want an interpretor that harks back to 2006...

* Test Freezing Issue on Mac OSX

Both Sathyanarayanan and Karsten reported that stem's integ tests freeze on Mac OSX. After a dozen hours of hair pulling I've narrowed it down to an issue where control sockets are left in a CLOSE_WAIT state when closed, and eventually we lose the ability to make new control sockets... https://trac.torproject.org/6235

From what I can tell this is either an issue with Tor, Python, or Mac

OSX (my money's on the last). Help welcome if anyone has ideas.

Other random things from this month include going to the Fremont Fair, attending a SEAPIG meeting (local python developer group) and making travel arrangements to attend Defcon later in July.

Cheers! -Damian

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/6172 [2] https://trac.torproject.org/5262 [3] https://trac.torproject.org/6114 [4] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html [5] https://trac.torproject.org/5493 [6] https://trac.torproject.org/6205 [7] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/66376f5 [8] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/385b05b [9] https://trac.torproject.org/6082 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/6171 [11] https://trac.torproject.org/5454 [12] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-June/003608.html [13] https://trac.torproject.org/6257