Forwarding with permission from Nick, since he sent it to only a sekrit list, and it should go to a public list.

Onward and upward, --Roger

----- Forwarded message from Nick Mathewson nickm@torproject.org -----

Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:52:02 -0400 From: Nick Mathewson nickm@torproject.org To: network-team network-team@lists.torproject.org Subject: [network-team] Hand-off notes for Nick's vacation

Hi!

You can also read this at https://gitlab.torproject.org/nickm/notes/-/wikis/Vacation2020 -- it is a list of stuff I thought might be helpful or important to think about while I'm away.

This is me signing off for the next while. As documented in the calendar, I'll be back on 14 September. If you need to contact me in the meanwhile, please use Signal or personal email. I'll be routing all mailing lists to a "Post-Vacation" folder.

I'm going to use this email to checkpoint a few things before I go off, so it'll be easier to pick them up. I've asked George to help me write it.

I've sorted this list in order of decreasing priority.

# 0.4.4

We are planning to release a stable 0.4.4 release on 15 September. That's the day after I get back. I just put out an 0.4.4.4-rc release on 13 August.

There are still some 044-must/044-should issues that

I think we have several possible choices here:

* If there are no further risky changes in 0.4.4 between now and 15 September, we can just release 0.4.4 stable on that date. * If we want to do futher risky changes between now and 15 September, it would probably be okay to plan for another release candidate on 1 September. That would let me put out a stable when I get back. * If you don't do a release candidate between now and when I get back, but there _are_ risky changes, then we should put out a release candidate when I'm back, and we can plan to put out the stable 2-3 weeks after that.

I have updated the ReleasingTor.md documentation in the master branch to reflect current practice.

There is a ticket at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/issues/11 to track things we need to do for the release. Please make sure that the "must" and "should" tickets get triaged and handled (or not handled) as appropriate.

# Caitlin's internship

Caitlin has been working on https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40066 ??? there is a patch with a merge request. Please make sure to give them all the help they need, and answer their questions promptly and usefully: if I understand correctly, their internship ends at the end of month.

# Sponsor 55

Sponsor 55 will come to an end over the weekend. For a list of what we've done, have a look at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/wikis/NetworkTeam/Sponsor55Rep... . I sent a copy of this pad to gaba and david under the heading "sponsor 55 - what was worked on (so we can start having stuff together for the report)".

There are remaining tickets labeled with "sponsor 55". I believe that none of them are must-do items for the sponsor. But some of them are things we need to do before we can release 0.4.5, and some of them are things that we should do while the code is still fresh in our heads. I will try to sort these out as much as I can before I go, but there may be remaining tickets for you to sort.

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/issues/12 is the tracking ticket for removing the S55 label from the remaining tickets.

# Gitlab best practices

IMPORTANT: Make sure you are seeing new tickets in tpo/core/tor that do not mention you specifically. This may not be the default. You can do this either by looking at the complete list of tickets every day or two, then skipping to the end... or by updating the settings in "User settings > notifications" at https://gitlab.torproject.org/profile/notifications .

When somebody submits a patch but not a merge request, please ask them to do a merge request if they can, and open one for them if they can't.

If a volunteer has been sitting on a needs_revision patch for a long time, consider asking them for permission to take it over and fix it up.

# 0.4.5 best practices

Please remember how to handle tickets that are possibly backportable.

When making a Merge Request:

1. Make the branch against the target maint-0.x.y branch. 2. Make your merge request against the target maint-0.x.y branch. 3. Note that the MR is backportable in your MR message.

When merging, if it is even _possible_ we want to backport more:

1. Give the MR the "Backport" label. 2. Un-assign yourself from the MR: you don't need to review it any more. 3. Put the MR into the latest milestone to which it has not been backported.

# Tickets and MRs assigned to Nick

There are a bunch of tickets still assigned to me. Please feel to take any of them over that you want. I'm going to go through them and unasssign any that I think should be handled before I'm back, with notes.

If you review an MR that I wrote and it needs changes, please consider making those changes yourself or getting somebody else to do so, if you feel that you can. I won't mind, and it's probably better if this code doesn't rot for a whole month.

# CI

We now have CI running on gitlab, with debian-stable. It covers (I believe) hardened builds, gcc, clang, stem, chutney, distcheck, and documentation. It's implemented in .gitlab.yml and in scripts/ci/ . Feel free to hack on it, but make sure to make any changes to maint-0.3.5 and merge them forward from there: it was really unpleasant to have our appveyor and travis files diverge among versions.

There are more changes to make, and please feel free to move ahead with this stuff: I've tried to update stuff on trac as we go.

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40048 is the ticket for moving to gitlab CI.

Also please remember that super-slow CI is not our friend. You can make hardened builds run much faster by merging tpo/core/tor#40088, once you trust it. :)

# 0.4.5 planning

Please feel free to make progress on planning and coding stuff for 045, but keep im mind that technical debt and leftovers from 044 would also be very smart things to work on.

The ticket where our discussions have been happening is: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/issues/7

# TROVE-2020-005

We have an open low-severity issue tracked as tpo/core/tor#40080 (private) and tpo/core/tor#40086 (public). More thought there would always be valuable. If it is indeed low-severity, the it's okay to merge it in 044 if you like it and are confident in it. But please be careful: the code is subtle.

# Tor ticket triage

I closed our original ticket triage activity, and opened a new one: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/issues/10

Feel free to do as much or as little here as you think good, and/or to come up with different ideas.

# Blog post comments

We're supposed to moderate comments on all our blog posts, and I just put out a release (0.4.4.4-rc) on 13 August. Please keep an eye on the comments there and approve the ones that are on-topic.

# Defer till later: rename 'master', autostyle the code.

We're planning to rename "master" to "main", and to get clang-format running happily on our code. Both of these are deferred till I get back in September.

----- End forwarded message -----