Inspirated

While working for GSoC last year I kept track of Bazaar patches I sent in for Arsenal. This year I was using Git and as the need arose to generate a submission tarball for my commits I wrote this small utility script: git-generate-tarball.py.

To invoke the script, change into your Git repository and provide an author name and a file as an argument:

[krkhan@orthanc tor]$ /home/krkhan/Downloads/git-generate-tarball.py "Kamran Riaz Khan " /home/krkhan/Downloads/tor-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz

generating tarball for commits between Mon May 23 00:00:00 2011 +0000 and Mon Aug 22 19:00:00 2011 +0000
generating patch for commit 5a801a8c8b71c9551a80913398135809cb10cecd
…
/home/krkhan/Downloads/tor-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz created

The default starting and ending dates for the commits correspond to the schedule for GSoC 2011. You can specify a starting date for the commits you want to be packaged using the --since argument:

[krkhan@orthanc arm]$ /home/krkhan/Downloads/git-generate-tarball.py --since="August 1, 2011" "Kamran Riaz Khan " /home/krkhan/Downloads/arm-gsoc-krkhan.tar.bz2

generating tarball for commits between August 1, 2011 and Mon Aug 22 19:00:00 2011 +0000
generating patch for commit 546ca73259d7863e3efe5e11e09c023c2790a2f6
…
/home/krkhan/Downloads/arm-gsoc-krkhan.tar.bz2 created

Same goes for the --before argument:

[krkhan@orthanc tor]$ /home/krkhan/Downloads/git-generate-tarball.py --before="August 14, 2011" "Kamran Riaz Khan " /home/krkhan/Downloads/tor-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz

generating tarball for commits between Mon May 23 00:00:00 2011 +0000 and August 14, 2011
generating patch for commit 5a801a8c8b71c9551a80913398135809cb10cecd
…
/home/krkhan/Downloads/tor-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz created

Or a combination of both:

[krkhan@orthanc arm]$ /home/krkhan/Downloads/git-generate-tarball.py --since="August 1, 2011" --before="August 14, 2011" "Kamran Riaz Khan " /home/krkhan/Downloads/arm-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz

generating tarball for commits between August 1, 2011 and August 14, 2011
generating patch for commit 546ca73259d7863e3efe5e11e09c023c2790a2f6
…
/home/krkhan/Downloads/arm-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz created

If you want to leave the dates undefined you can leave the arguments empty. For example, the following command shall process all commits before June 1, 2011:

[krkhan@orthanc arm]$ /home/krkhan/Downloads/git-generate-tarball.py --since= --before="June 1, 2011" "Kamran Riaz Khan " /home/krkhan/Downloads/arm-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz

generating tarball for commits before June 1, 2011
generating patch for commit 8b4dc162f75d5129e41f028c7253b7b265c8af76
…
/home/krkhan/Downloads/arm-gsoc-krkhan.tar.gz created

Hope this helps fellow GSoCers.

“O Marvelous! what new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.” — William Carlos Williams

Up until now my GSoC development was dealing with the “monitoring” aspects of arm. In addition to being a monitor a Tor controller is also supposed to, well, control the Tor client. Tor offers a detailed specification which can be used to interact with a running client and control it in a myriad of ways. This specification is then used by controllers like arm and Vidalia to fetch and/or update the client configuration.

The CLI configuration panel for arm already understood the control specification quite well. The first step towards reusing those portions for the GUI was to rewrite the inheritance code so that underlying data structures of the CLI were automagically connected to the Gtk+ models. That made the actual implementation of GUI configuration panel a whole lot cleaner. As things are, the panel detects the data types of configuration options and opens pertinent dialogs for user input:

(Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

Next item in to-do list was implementing a path selection panel in arm. After a thorough discussion on IRC with the core Tor developers it was decided that giving end-users complete access to the PathSupport component of TorCtl would ultimately hurt their anonymity with little (if any) pay-off. Letting them choose the country of their exit relay was still seen as a useful feature which is what I’m working on right now.

Meanwhile, while setting the configuration options needed to choose an exit country I figured that arm should be notified of any changes made by other controllers to the options in question. Damian pointed me to ticket #1692 which proposed an enhancement for this very purpose. He had already created a patch for the job but few quirks needed to be addressed before the patch was ready for being merged. Thanks to help from Nick Mathewson and Robert Ransom I was able to fix the code and get it inside the tor and tor-spec repositories.

To make use of the new CONF_CHANGED event I also wrote patches for TorCtl and Vidalia. The TorCtl patch shall help me in making arm aware of configuration changes. While the Vidalia one is a proof-of-concept which created a signal and connected it to a debug function which for the time being just logs the options changed for the running Tor instance.

I hope to be done with exit node selection within a couple of days after which I’ll port the feature to CLI version of arm. It’ll be a good little exercise to start decoupling the arm interfaces from its backend so that future development is more streamlined and fun.