[tor-reports] Nick's post-March status report

[Nick Mathewson]

In the past month, I have:

 - Advanced the discussion on #7153 sufficiently to meet the March
deliverable (more work remains).
 - Worked with Vinod to track down a set of issues in Stegotorus's use
of Libevent. It turned out that there were a doozy: its
close-connection logic was looking at "Have I ever received data" when
it should have been looking at "have I ever received a block", and
prematurely calling shutdown() on connections before delivering data.
This wasn't a Libevent bug at all-- it was provoked by certain
libevent versions because of the way that they handled deciding how
much data to read at once.
 - Resolved and/or triaged a pretty bug number of 0.2.4 issues. We are
now down to only 45 active tickets.  Check out closed tickets in the
last month: some pretty exciting stuff got implemented and/or merged.
 - Began researching usable performant portable Ed25519
implementations. Current candidates are ed25519-donna by "Andrew M"
and the edd25519-ref10 implementation from SUPERCOP.
 - Started formulating and discussing a plan for improved testing in 0.2.5.

My schedule has been affected by my spouse's return to active
employment, and my consequent increased childcare load.  This should
reach an equilibrium over the next couple of weeks.

In the coming month I hope to:
 - Get all 0.2.4.x items completed and merged
 - Get 0.2.4.x into beta or rc status.
 - Review and merge pending bugfixes and features in 0.2.5.
 - Try to get an inventory of designs and proposals that need to be
written for 0.2.5.
 - Evaluate our progress so far on our 0.2.4 timeline, and write a
timeline for 0.2.5.
 - Write proposals for some 0.2.5 features.

peace,
-- 
Nick