[tor-reports] Core Tor team report to sponsor4 Dec/16 & Jan/17

[isabela at riseup.net]

Core Tor Team Dec/16 & Jan/17 Report

In December our team was finishing two big releases, our new stable
0.2.8 and alpha 0.3.0.1 series. But we also had some time to start
investigating and preparing things for planning our next big project,
which is to reduce Tor overhead for low-bandwidth scenarios as much as
possible, with a focus on the directory protocol.

We reviewed proposals and past discussions on the subject and in January
as we came back from holidays we put together an execution plan[1].
Which lists questions we should investigate more to help shape the focus
of our work and a list of mitigation we can be executing in a 'near'
timeframe.

In short our plan is:

	* Measure! [2] Begin in January, start having results within 2 weeks,
coding done within 1 month, all results done within 2 months.
	* Design! [3] Begin in January, finish within 2 months, depending on
measurement.
	* Implement! [4] Begin within a month. Additional time TBD based on
previous steps.
	* Allow post-implementation time for debugging, and further
improvements TBD as we find them.

Each one of these phases now has 'master tickets' that hosts all the
tasks related to accomplishing them. And start working on the first
'Measurement' task [5] which is to find a way to measure, over time,
split up by type of directory request, how much bandwidth a client uses
for requests and for responses.

[1]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/Sponsor4Plan
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21205
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21209
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21215
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21206