[tor-project] PieroV's Monthly Status Report, March 2024

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone, here is my status report for March 2024.

This month, I continued the rebase on the Firefox Rapid Release channel.
I've arrived on par with mozilla-beta, i.e., I have a branch based on 
Firefox 125b, and I'm following that channel. I'm trying to rebase my 
branch onto each beta tag.
I've also fixed the various build and runtime errors, and the branch can 
be built and used (even though this is seriously discouraged as it 
hasn't been reviewed and we haven't done our audit work yet).
However, this is quite reassuring because it reduces the uncertainty of 
our ESR transition work.
I've opened an issue [0] to document this process and all the conflicts 
I had to merge manually, both trivial and non-trivial.

At a certain point, while working on this task, I implemented a script 
that act as a helper for our usual rebase review procedures [1].
I'm sure it has a lot of margin for improvement, but it should handle 
our most common cases.
My idea is to use it also for the script to perform continuous automatic 
rebases of our branches. I wrote a proof of concept in 30 minutes, but 
nothing was ready for production and/or publication. Still, I'm very 
excited by the possibilities of automation we could implement.

Apart from that, I worked on refactoring our TorConnect module [2]. I 
started it to fix an issue detected by the linter we've had for one year 
and a half [3]. It was not trivial to fix, and eventually, I ended up 
reorganizing the whole file, even though the contents haven't changed much.
At the end of the month, I also opened another merge request 
specifically for error handling [4].
Together, they should hopefully help the further Android developments 
other apps team members are working on.

Finally, I worked on some issues about fingerprinting vectors and helped 
with our March releases.

Best,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42441
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/pierov/lazy-scripts/-/blob/main/diff-of-diffs.py
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/938
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41114
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/968