Free Software Efforts (2017W37)
Published:
I’d like to start making weekly reports again on my free software efforts. Part of the reason for these reports is for me to see how much time I’m putting into free software. Hopefully I can keep these reports up.
Debian
I have updated txtorcon (a Twisted-based asynchronous Tor control protocol implementation used by ooniprobe, magic-wormhole and tahoe-lafs) to its latest upstream version. I’ve also added two new binary packages that are built by the txtorcon source package: python3-txtorcon and python-txtorcon-doc for Python 3 support and generated HTML documentation respectively.
I have gone through the scapy (Python module for the forging and dissection of network packets) bugs and closed a couple that seem to have been silently fixed by new upstream releases and not been caught in the BTS. I’ve uploaded a minor revision to include a patch that fixes the version number reported by scapy.
I have prepared and uploaded a new package for measurement-kit (a portable C++11 network measurement library) from the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which at time of writing is still in the NEW queue. I have also updated ooniprobe (probe for the Open Observatory of Network Interference) to its latest upstream version.
I have updated the Swedish debconf strings in the xastir (X Amateur Station Tracking and Information Reporting) package, thanks to the translators.
I have updated the direwolf (soundcard terminal node controller for APRS) package to its latest upstream version and fixed the creation of the system user to run direwolf with systemd to happen at the time the package is installed. Unfortunately, it has been necessary to drop the PDF documentation from the package as I was unable to contact the upstream author and acquire the Microsoft Word sources for this release.
I have reviewed and sponsored the uploads of the new packages comptext (GUI based tool to compare two text streams), comptty (GUI based tool to compare two radio teletype streams) and flnet (amateur radio net control station software) in the hamradio team. Thanks to Ana Custura for preparing those packages, comptext and comptty are now available in unstable.
I have updated the Debian Hamradio Blend metapackages to include cubicsdr (a software defined radio receiver). This build also refreshes the list of packages that can now be included as they had not been packaged at the time of the last build.
I have produced and uploaded an initial package for python-azure-devtools (development tools for Azure SDK and CLI for Python) and have updated python-azure (the Azure SDK for Python) to a recent git snapshot. Due to some issues with python-vcr it is currently not possible to run the test suite as part of the build process and I’m watching the situation. I have also fixed the auto dependency generation for python3-azure, which had previously been broken.
Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #873036, #871940, #869566, #873083, #867420, #861753, #855385, #855497, #684727, #683711
Tor Project
I have been working through tickets for Atlas (a tool for looking up details about Tor relays and bridges) and have merged and deployed a number of fixes. Some highlights include: bandwidth sorting in search results is now semantically correct (not just an alphanumeric sort ignoring units), added when a relay was first seen to the details page along with the host name if a reverse DNS record has been found for the IP address of the relay and added support for the NoEdConsensus flag (although happily no relays had this flag at the time this support was added).
The metrics team has been working on merging projects into the metrics team website to give a unified view of information about the Tor network. This week I have been working towards a prototype of a port of Atlas to the metrics website’s style and this work has been published in my personal Atlas git repository. If you’d like to have a click around, you can do so.
A relay operators meetup will be happening in Montreal on the 14th of October. I won’t be present, but I have taken this opportunity to ask operators if there’s anything that they would like from Atlas that they are not currently getting. Some feedback has already been received and turned into code and trac tickets.
I also attended the weekly metrics team meeting in #tor-dev.
Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #6787, #9814, #21958, #21636, #23296, #23160
Sustainability
I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report.
I continue to be happy to spend my time on this work, however I do find myself in a position where it may not be sustainable when it comes to hardware. My desktop, a Sun Ultra 24, is now 10 years old and I’m starting to see random reboots which so far have not been explained. It is incredibly annoying to have this happen during a long build. Further, the hard drives in my NAS which are used for the local backups and for my local Debian mirror are starting to show SMART errors. It is not currently within my budget to replace any of this hardware. Please contact me if you believe you can help.
This week’s energy was provided by Club Mate