Greetings wonderful world. January has been delightfully focused on a couple substantial feature branches that are now merged!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Descriptor Lazy Loading --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When reading descriptors without validation (which is now the default) Stem is 25-70% faster!

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-January/008211.html

This is because we now parse descriptors fields on-demand. Just need a server descriptor's exit policy? That's all we'll bother reading. This is why the heavier the descriptor type the larger the benefit.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unified Python 2/3 Codebase --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to Foxboron Stem now has a unified python 2/3 codebase!

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14075

This means that Stem now runs directly with any version of python from 2.6 to 3.x. Prior to this Stem did a 2to3 export when you installed it to provide cross-version compatibility.

For users, the benefit of Foxboron's overhaul is that python3 installation and test runs are now much, much quicker.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beside these a few other noteworthy tasks were...

* Nick had a handful of suggestions for testing improvements, neatest of which was to include the command to re-run just individual tests when we have a failure. (#14113)

* Our port_usage() function always returned None. (#14046)

* Proc connection resolution could fail on busy systems. (#14048)

* Fixed how the 'strict' argument works with exit policies. (#14314)

Cheers! -Damian