[metrics-team] Trac housekeeping

Karsten Loesing karsten at torproject.org
Fri Sep 1 09:10:57 UTC 2017


Hello team,

I have been looking through the tickets under Trac's Metrics/*
components, and I feel we could do a better job keeping only those
tickets there that we actually plan to work on as a team.

Here's the list:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&component=^Metrics&group=component&max=400&order=changetime

In total, there are roughly 300 tickets on that list, many of which
haven't been modified in years.

I'd rather want us to use tickets for things we're currently working on
or that we think we might be working on in the next 6 months. Longer
term plans could instead go into some "vision" section on the wiki.

But honestly, I believe that a fair number of the open tickets has long
been forgotten by their reporters and owners. We can probably just close
50 or 100 of these tickets without losing much information or without
risking running out of ideas what to work on in 6 months from now.

How do we start this? Some ideas:

 - We ask the network team whether they mind us closing any of the
tickets in Metrics/Analysis, and if they do, we kindly ask them to
either touch the ones they care about and ping us afterwards. Obviously,
having a sentence or two on the tickets why they still care about
something and what particular aspects they care about would help. Maybe
they even want to adopt some tickets into Core Tor/*.

 - We ask ticket reporters and/or owners of tickets in
Metrics/Censorship analysis whether they still need to keep these
tickets open. It seems that most of these analyses don't require open
tickets anymore, and the contained analyses are still useful in closed
tickets when linked from the appropriate wiki pages. And while we're
talking about these tickets, we might want to discuss merging this
component with Metrics/Analysis. After all, censorship analysis is just
one aspect of analysis, and censorship folks could easily use a tag to
say that they're looking at metrics data with the primary focus of
censorship.

 - We make a plan what to do with Compass, so that we can finally close
some of the tickets in Metrics/Compass. I still believe it's a useful
service, even though it seriously needs some love.

 - The following doesn't close any tickets, but I'd like to split up
Metrics/Metrics website into two components: 1) Metrics/Statistics for
aggregating descriptors and producing CSV files and 2) Metrics/Website
for everything that's visible on the Tor Metrics website. This doesn't
imply splitting up the code base yet, though that'll be a useful next
step. But for now, I'd just like to separate issues/tickets. (Feel free
to remind me what places need an update when renaming or creating
components.)

 - Again, this doesn't close any tickets, but I'd like to rename
Metrics/metrics-lib to Metrics/Library, reflecting that we renamed the
library a few weeks back.

What else could we do to become the masters of the Metrics/* components
again? ("Wait, what do you mean, *again*...?")

All the best,
Karsten

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