[tor-project] PieroV's Monthly Status Report, November 2022

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for November 2022.

At the beginning of the month, I attended the Reproducible Build 2022 
Summit in Venice [0]. I discovered a lot of new stuff there, and 
hopefully, we might apply some to Tor Browser, too.

Then, for the rest of the month, I mostly worked on refinements to Tor 
Browser 12.0 series.
One of the most important features I have worked on is improving the 
experience with the multi-lingual builds. For example, I have 
implemented a notification to explain to the user why Tor Browser chose 
that language, with a button to go directly to the language preferences [1].
I have also fixed a few bugs introduced by the tor-launcher refactor [2][3].
I also managed to get yet another patch upstreamed to Firefox [4].

I had another important task, too: reviewing the profile files with our 
custom Firefox configuration [5]. I removed some old settings, added new 
ones, and tried to add missing links to our bug tracker for the ones 
that we already had. I hope this will help us with future documentation 
and review work.

Finally, I helped to prepare some releases and to verify the 
reproducibility of the ones we released.

We should be very close to 12.0 becoming stable: we are very excited 
about it, and we would love to get any feedback. So, please, consider 
downloading [6] the fifth alpha of 12.0 (we are publishing it later 
today) and giving it a test ride 😄️.

Thank you very much,
Pier

[0] https://reproducible-builds.org/events/venice2022/
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41378
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41436
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41429
[4] https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D161264
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40783
[6] https://www.torproject.org/download/alpha/