Tor network team meeting notes, 19 Nov 2018 - tor-project

21 Nov 2018


      Hi all!
Logs here:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2018/tor-meeting.2018-11-19-17.58.html
Pad contents below:
= Network team meeting pad! =
This week's team meeting is on Monday at 1800 UTC (1 hour later for daylight saving time) on #tor-meeting on OFTC.
Welcome to our meeting!
First meeting each month: Tuesday at 2300 UTC
Other meetings each month: Mondays at 1800 UTC (1 hour later for daylight saving time)
On #tor-meeting on OFTC.
(This channel is logged while meetings are in progress.)
(See https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-September/001459.htm...
for background.)
Want to participate?  Awesome!  Here's what to do:
    1. If you have updates, enter them below, under your name.
    2. If you see anything you want to talk about in your updates, put them in boldface!
    3. Show up to the IRC meeting and say hi!
After each week's meetings, the contents of this pad will be sent to tor-project @ lists.torproject.org.  After that is done, the pad can be used for the next week.
== Previous notes ==
(Search the list archive for older notes.)
15 Oct: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-October/002027.html
22 Oct: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-October/002032.html
29 Oct: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-October/002036.html
6 Nov: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-November/002047.html
12 Nov: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-November/002054.html
== Stuff to do every week =
* Let's check and update the roadmap.  What's done, and what's coming up?
url to roadmap: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ufrun1khEo5Cwd6OwngERn829wU3W3eskdrr...
* Check reviewer assignments at
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ufrun1khEo5Cwd6OwngERn829wU3W3eskdrr...
* Also, let's check for things we need update on our spreadsheet!  Are there important documents we should link to?  Things we should archive?
* Check rotations at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/TeamRota...
* Let's look at proposed tickets!
0.3.5 (bugs only): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...
0.4.0: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...
== Reminders ==
* Remember to "/me status: foo" at least once daily.
* Remember that our current code reviews should be done by end-of-week.
* Make sure you are in touch with everybody with whom you are doing work for the next releases
* PLEASE add comments to the questions at the end of https://pad.riseup.net/p/q0s3rQxVzSeZ
* Remember to fill up actual point when you finish a task (as well as "fix" the estimate when starting the issue).
* Add planned PTO to the calendar https://storm.torproject.org/shared/ISA5L5nH0Xu88iqSCx9ZjCXYSMKOBTdbUeWarbdG...
<< Remember that priority is Sponsor 8 - roadmap is sort out by priority >> Activity O2.5 is the one we are missing and need to be done in 2 months.
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---- 19 November 2018
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== Announcements ==
Please don't bulk-delete all the old entries from this pad any more.  Instead, delete the "planned" and "actual" for the previous week, but leave the "planned" for this week in place. Please check the dates before deleting.
Check other's people call for help in their entries.
Snowflake kickoff meeting on November 27th: overview and what needs to be done. TUESDAY november 27th at 23 UTC in #tor-meeting <<-- Come to the party!
== Discussion ==
* sponsor 8 work
    • O2.5 (bootstrap reporting) is most important
    • - right now working on this: catalyst, ahf, dgoulet, teor. any of you need help with it?
* Please see tickets with tag "035-rc-blocker?" -- are any of them really rc blockers?  Are there any other true rc blockers?  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...
* Is our process for "proposed" working? <-- we still didn't go through it yet
teor says: things seem to get stuck in proposed.
* We'd like some more feedback about sbws and relay bandwidth self-tests:
    Should we improve relay bandwidth self-tests? (#22453)
    Or should we rely on sbws to create the bandwidths it needs?
    What about test networks?
Should we make bandwidths grow faster in sbws?
    Or is a ramp-up period of 2-5 weeks fast enough?
    (These are maximum ramp-up times: client traffic also makes bandwidths grow.)
Details here:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2018-November/013546.html
Reviewer role responsabilities: https://pad.riseup.net/p/q0s3rQxVzSeZ - we are continuing next week with this discussion.
== Recommended links ==
Powershell cheat sheet (for Windows/Appveyor builds):
    https://ramblingcookiemonster.github.io/images/Cheat-Sheets/powershell-basic...
== Updates ==
NOTE NEW FORMAT!
Name:
    Week of XYZ (planned):
        - What you planned for last week.
    Week of XYZ (actual):
        - What you did last week.
    Week of ABC (planned):
        - What you're planning to do this week.
    Help with:
    •      - Something you may need help with.
PLEASE DO NOT BULK-DELETE THE OLD ENTRIES!
Leave the "Planned" parts!
Leave the parts for last week and this week!
Nick:
    Week of 11/12 (planned):
        - Send comments about prop295 draft back to Tomer et al
        - Triage 0.3.5 must-do vs may-do stuff.
        - Continue revising publish/subscribe code pending comments from Taylor #28226.
        - Continue work on "dormant mode" logic for #28335.  Hope to finish first draft, but might pend #28226 work.
        - Time permitting, add more tests for myfamily memory improvements (#27359)
        - Plan when to do next alpha/stable releases.
        - Write a schedule for upcoming releases
        - Backports to 0.3.4 etc
    Week of 11/12 (actual):
        - Marked 035-rc-blocker tickets that we need to have done asap
        - More revisions on "dormant mode"
        - Released an alpha
        - Tried to get backports done
        - Planned releases through January (see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/CoreTorR... )
        - Worked on CI rotation; tried to get freebsd passing
        - interviews
    Week of 11/19 (planned):
        - Send comments about prop295 draft back to Tomer et al
        - Write tests for family compression branch #27359
        - write tests for dormant branch #28335
        - Inbox zero
        - interviews
        - book travel for brussels
        - Vacation Wed through Fri.
• Want help with:
Mike:
    week of 11/12 (planned)
      - GPG? Does anyone use it? can we agree to stop? Kidding. ;)
      - More WTF-PAD fixups, tests
      - Vanguards release?
      - Datagram paper diff for nick
    Week of 11/12 (actual)
      - Corrdinated WTF things and triage with asn
      - Ended up having to do a lot more errands and moving tasks than expected
    Week of 11/19 (planned)
      - Short week.
      - Vacation next monday and tuesday (will miss meeting).
    help with:
        Nick/asn: Can we decide on something I must-do this week? Like update the paper and do maybe one WTF-PAD
        crucial item that is a blocker? That way I don't get distracted and drop something until next weds.
ahf:
Week of 11/12 (planned):
    Sponsor 8:
        - Hook up transports.c with the code from #28179 and test that it all
          still works on all our platforms.
    Sponsor 19
        - One interview this week with a candidate.
        - Continue looking into Snowflake.
    Misc:
        - Do the Mexico reimbursement that I keep postponing.
Week of 11/12 (actually):
    Sponsor 8:
        - Got #28179 cleaned up, moved to first round of review with David,
          Windows code still lacks tests. Talked with Nick about event loop testing.
        - Fixed #28485.
        - Began to look at #27100.
        - Talked with Hans (TGP) about #28409
    Sponsor 19
        - Interviews with more candidates. Things seems to be going well.
        - Not much Snowflake stuff this week.
    Misc:
        - Review of #21377
        - Booked trip for Brussels.
Week of 11/19 (hopefully):
    Sponsor 8:
        - Work on #27100 while we move forward with reviews of #28179.
        - Add missing tests to #28179.
        - Figure out what we do with benchmarks for #28409.
    Sponsor 19:
        - A few more interviews left.
        - Prepare for Snowflake kick off meeting next week (the 27th!)
    Misc:
        - Test #28518 on FreeBSD.
        - Some reviews
asn:
    [Might be offline for part of the meeting depending on dinner time.]
    Week of 11/12 (planned):
    - Sufficient review has happenened on the WTF-PAD branch.
      It's now time to start working on the TODO items and wrapping this up so
      that we move towards merge. Coordinate this with Mike.
    - Do reviews.
    - Continue helping with the anti-censorship team hires.
    Week of 11/12 (actual):
    - Coordinated with Mike on the TODO items of WTF-PAD:
      - Started coding unittests for WTF-PAD: Have written a bunch of them
        already and generated a few review points as well.
      - I was passed a code by Riastradh that tests probability
        distributions. I'm currently studying the code to see how to apply this
        to the WTF-PAD prob distributions. It's complicated tests and this is
        kinda of a rabbithole with unclear benefits, so I might pull out if
        this gets too intense.
      - Still need to revise my unittests that test histograms to make them
        more robust.
    - Help with anti-censorship team hires.
    - Did reviews.
    Week of 11/19 (actual):
    - Continue review and striking out items from the WTF-PAD TODO
      list. Hopefully we can have the branch in merge_ready soon.
    - Continue with the anti-censorship team interviews.
    - Do reviews.
    Help with:
    - All good.
dgoulet:
    Week of 11/12 (planned):
      - Holiday on November 12th.
      - Review #28179 important s8 ticket then move on to #28180.
      - Help nickm with #28335 and childs.
    Week of 11/12 (actual):
      - Review on EOL policy (#28453)
      - Review nickm's #28335 and #28249
      - HSv3 ticket work: merge, comment, patch and review: #28275, #28128,
        #27471, #28425, #27841.
    Week of 11/19 (planned):
      - Released torsocks 2.3.0 this morning (\o/)
      - Big s8 ahf's branch has arrived in my courtyard for review: #28179
      - Continue work on #28335 with nickm.
gaba:
    Week of 11/12 (actual):
     - weekly meetings (ooni, metrics, fundraising, las vegas) and 1:1s
     - metrics data architect position
     - participate in interviews for anti-censorship team developer
     - ooni roadmap
     - gettor
    Week of 11/19 (planned):
     - anti-censorship interviews
     - ooni roadmap
     - OOO thursday & friday AND taking off monday & tuesday (but will be there for network meeting and snowflake meeting)
    help with:
     - communicating anything about sponsor8-bootstrap help/needs and progress
catalyst:
    week of 11/12 (2018-W46) (planned):
        - reviews
        - #27167
        - 0.3.5 bugfixes as needed
    week of 11/19 (2018-W46) (actual):
        - travel planning for Brussels; got some clarification about pre-approvals
        - fixed some Doxygen breakage (#28435)
        - reviewed #27740 (Rust patch mismerge)
        - looked at Nick's ringbuf stuff
        - wrote some comments following up about ringbufs and alternatives
        - reviewed feedback from mcs on bootstrap reporting changes
    week of 11/19 (2018-W47) (planned):
        - following up with Nick about #28226 if needed
        - finishing up review of #28226 (pubsub)
        - #27167
        - reviews
        - travel request for Brussels
    help with:
haxxpop:
    help with:
teor (offline):
Week of 12 Nov (planned):
        - Continue to work on s8 bootstrap tickets
          - pick guards from a reasonably live consensus (#24661)
          - do path selection from a reasonably live consensus (#28319)
        - Fix the s8 chutney consensus failure bugs
        - Do a review of the sbws specs once a week
        - Maybe: Make the fallback script ignore addresses in the whitelist, so we can rebuild the fallback list
Week of 12 Nov (actual):
        - shorter week due to Internet Freedom Hack over last weekend
        - sbws spec ticket review, fixed sbws rounding (#27689 and children), relay bandwidth tests review
          - too much sbws, I won't do any more sbws until next Monday
        - created "end of life tor" instructions (#28453) and cleaned up after 0.3.2 on trac
        - backport reviews for 0.2.9, 0.3.3, and 0.3.4
        - emailed Travis about increased network failure rates in tor and sbws
          - they suggested some changes, which sbws has implemented
        - Fixed Appveyor CI OpenSSL build failures (#28399)
        - Revised Windows version code (#28096)
        - Talked to researchers about Prio and PrivCount in Tor
        - Booked network team hackfest travel, other admin
        - Reviewed metrics job applications
Week of 19 Nov (planned):
        - Continue to work on s8 bootstrap tickets
          - pick guards from a reasonably live consensus (#24661)
          - do path selection from a reasonably live consensus (#28319)
        - Maybe: Fix the s8 chutney consensus failure bugs
        - Maybe: Make the fallback script ignore addresses in the whitelist, so we can rebuild the fallback list
        - Defer: Any more reviews on sbws
        - Defer: Most other tasks
Week of 19 Nov (actual):
        - sbws and relay bandwidth testing feedback
        - Meeting about Mozilla's privacy-preserving user stats system "Prio"
        - Helped with sponsor 19 analysis of Orbot Onionoo load
        - Metrics job applications
        - Stuck on pick guards from a reasonably live consensus (#24661)
Help with:
        - Please feel free to remind me that Sponsor 8 is the priority right now.
          I spent a lot of time on other tasks last week, some were high-priority, some weren't.
juga:
- Week 11/12 (planned):
        - Tor code
            - Relays should regularly do a larger bandwidth self-test (#22453)
            - bandwidth testing circuits should be allowed to use our guards (#19009)
            - In a private network some relays advertise zero bandwidth-observed (#24250)
        - sbws
            - Change integration tests from bash to POSIX shell (#28106)
        - revisions
    - Week 11/12 (actual):
        - "Relays should regularly do a larger bandwidth self-test"
        - "In a private network some relays advertise zero bandwidth-observed"
        - figure out network problems with sbws in production
        - figure out problems when transition from sbws-git to sbws-debian package
        - modify sbws to do not use local domain resolver
        - review ticket about the rounding algorithm in sbws
    - Week 11/19 (plan):
        - review more tickets about rounding
        - check that there are not TODOs related to the moment when we changed sbws to work as torflow
        - continue with "Serve bandwidth file used in the next vote"
        - continue with "In a private network some relays advertise zero bandwidth-observed"