Hey Damian!
Sorry, in my nearsightedness, having only ever had used Stem for parsing, I had not realised that enough of the control protocol was implemented in Stem to do this without using txtorcon! Please feel free to reword the posting (or suggest a change) that you think would more accurately reflect this.
No problem in the least. :P
For what it's worth Stem is a complete implementation of the control and directory specification. That is to say, everything in there *should* be supported (I keep an eye on all spec commits to ensure we continue to match everything tor has). If Stem's missing something then that's a bug I'd love to know about.
Blog post looks great. I'd probably only suggest a couple small tweaks...
* s/also outsourceable in Python to txtorcon/also outsourceable in Python to txtorcon or stem * Drop the paragraph after it since it doesn't seem to add much.
It's probably not worth including in the blog post but for what it's worth the following list all the controller and descriptor parser libs I'm aware of...
https://stem.torproject.org/faq.html#are-there-any-other-controller-librarie... https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#are-the...
Also, I would be delighted to co-mentor with you (and also meejah, if the intern decides to go the txtorcon route), that sounds great!
Great!