[tor-reports] Damian's Status Report - January 2017

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all! My status report this month reads better on my blog so here's
a link...

  http://blog.atagar.com/january2017/

If your heart's set on a plaintext version here it is.

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Oh for the love of... I'm having horrible luck this winter. Third bug to
knock me out. From the fever guessing this one was the flu. Ok virulent
antigens, you've had your fun with Damian. Time to leave him alone now...

None the less, this was a good month.

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Tor Internal Bylaws
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We finally have a ratified voting policy!

  https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/voting.txt
  https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/votes/17-01-27_voting_policy/summary.txt

Thanks everyone! Alison and I will put together some initial proposals
but first gonna take a little breather. :P

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Stem Test Speed
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During my morning commute I've been poking at Stem's test performance.
Faster tests mean quicker development cycles. Always a good investment.

This took some unexpected turns resulting in...

  * 22% faster integration tests.

  * 25% faster descriptor parsing when validating.

  * Our stem.util.test_tools module now provides a TimedTestRunner class
    that gives individual test runtimes. Sadly this is something Python's
    built-in unittest module doesn't have.

    You can run our tests with the '--verbose' argument to see this
    information...

    https://www.atagar.com/transfer/blog/verbose_test_output.png

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Other neat things this month include...

  * Added shared randomness checks David and George requested to
    DocTor (#17434).

  * Stem was unable to read shared randomness information (#21102).

  * Stem 1.5.4 hotfix to account for a failure by tor to conform
    with its spec (#21059).

  * Wrote a letter for the first time to a senator. I've been told
    I do strange things when I'm bored.