At the dev meting, we agreed to hold weekly TBB meetings in #tor-dev on IRC (irc.oftc.net), ideally either before or after the tor-core meetings. It looks like we're going to shoot for Wednesdays at 11:00am PST/19:00 UTC. If we can agree on this time, Nick has said that the tor-core meetings may be able to follow ours, pending approval from the rest of the Tor folks.
For the meetings themselves, I think we should try the following format, inspired by Scrum, but less rigid. Everyone makes 0 or more statements on the following three topics, with time for responses from others:
1. What have you been working on last week that other TBB people should be aware of?
2. Will you be working on anything TBB related next week that should/could involve other people?
3. Do you need anything else from anyone else to help you make progress or to get something reviewed+merged? If so, what do you need?
These meetings won't be used for progress metrics/evaluation, so don't feel the need to inflate things, explain already-solved snags in detail, discuss your various non-TBB/life distractions, or anything like that. The purpose here is strictly TBB coordination.
In particular, if you've been working on stuff that either isn't TBB-related or is too premature to be worth discussing in detail yet, you can skip items 1 and 2 entirely, or make them extremely brief (ie "Worked on the updater").
Similarly, if you're blocked on stuff that doesn't require other people's help/input to solve, you can skip item 3. Don't feel obligated to tell us about issues that involving others won't really help.
However, when discussion is necessary, we can and should deviate from the #1/#2/#3 pattern to discuss people's work/questions in some detail without plowing straight through to the next person immediately.
After everyone has their turn to say what's they've been doing/what's needed, we can do a little bit of freeform discussion on whatever other issues seem pressing and who should be doing what next, discuss any future releases/deadlines, and discuss recent support issues if any support people are present.
We will hard-stop at 20:00 UTC for the tor-core dev meeting to start (but hopefully will finish much earlier than that). If we end up consistently finishing early, we can make it later so as to run more fluidly into the tor-core meeting, for people who want to attend both.
Preemptively because I won't be at the meeting,
- What have you been working on last week that other TBB people should
be aware of?
I made bundles with tor-fw-helper and flash proxy. They worked for some users, but there are questions about port forwardings potentially lasting forever and about the safety of the UPnP and NAT-PMP libraries used by tor-fw-helper. I think the idea is stalled and I'm not planning to do anything more on it unless someone thinks of a different angle.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5213#comment:13 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5213#comment:15
I made and revised a patch to give pluggable transport binaries access to the OpenSSL DLLs on Windows. Pluggable transports are in a subdirectory so they don't automatically have the same DLLs that tor.exe does. The effect was that programs using M2Crypto (an OpenSSL wrapper) for certificate pinning failed to run, causing a fallback to the less robust flashproxy-reg-http program. I only noticed this bug a couple of weeks ago.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10845#comment:5
- Do you need anything else from anyone else to help you make progress
or to get something reviewed+merged? If so, what do you need?
I think FTE packaging (as in, the changes to Gitian descriptors) should have a look by someone else and be merged. Kevin and I checked that we matched each other's builds but I didn't look at it further than that.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10362
David Fifield