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

[Nick Mathewson]

Hi, all!

It's been a busy month.  I merged a lot of code, wrote a lot of code,
tried to fix a bunch of bugs, attended workshops, and tried to cope
with general January ennui.

The biggest event for Tor per se was the "small features for
consideration in Tor 0.2.4.x must be implemented by this date"
deadline, which we allowed to slip to January 20.  It led to lots of
scrambling to get little features implemented on time.  We're imposing
a Feb 15 deadline for actually merging pending features.  Anything
which can't get cleaned up and merged by then isn't going in 0.2.4.x.

We reviewed and merged all the remaining big features for 0.2.4
(including the improved "ntor" handshake), and many, many,  small
ones.  See the 0.2.4.8 and 0.2.4.9 changelogs, and the current tor
changes directory, for more information there.

I spent a couple of days triaging 0.2.4.x tickets.  We should do this
much more frequently.

I started to hit my stride working with Andrea on code review late
this month.  It turns out that when we review the same branch at the
same time, we're faste and more accurate than we would be otherwise.

I attended and spoke at the "Real World Crypto" workshop at Stanford,
and the "Ecrypt II: Crypto for 2020" event in Tenerife.  I'm trying to
get more visibility among cryptographers and cryptography implementors
about Tor's open needs in cryptography and cryptography implementors.
I was impressed and pleasantly surprised at the amount of respect and
good-will I encountered there ; I should be sure to stay in touch with
the people I met or re-met, and see if I can get any of them more
involved with the Tor community.

In Feburary, I must (for deliverables):
 * Write an implementation for #6027 (remaining ipv6 directory-source issues)
 * Work with Vinod to track down the stegotorus/libevent issue.
 * Find whatever piece of 195 makes sense to do, and write code for as
much as possible. (#7145)
 * Solve the stegotorus/Tor impedence mismatch (#7153)

Additionally, in February, I really really want to:
 * Merge or defer the pending small features from January.
 * Triage bugs marked for 0.2.4 and all tickets for 0.2.5.
 * Open a maint-0.2.4 branch; call master 0.2.5.0-alpha.
 * Try to start moving towards much much higher test coverage in Tor.
 * Fix as many bugs as I possibly can
 * Identify areas where we should be doing design and proposal
discussion for 0.2.5, and start working on proposals or finding people
who can.
 * Finally, finally, assuming we can get a project coordinator hired,
work to get them up to speed as fast as possible.
 * Sleep and exercise more, and try harder to get back down to a
40-hour workweek.


peace,
-- 
Nick