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NetworkTeam

Last edited by Gaba

Network Team

About us

Welcome to the Network Team page. The Network Team is a group of Tor people who are working on Tor back-end: the program called tor, the network simulators, the scripts that supports directory authorities, onion services, etc. Basically, everything that sends and receives bytes from the network. It used to maintain the pluggable transports and the bridge distribution but now we have the anti-censorship team doing it.

One of the reasons we are not listing the names of the team members here is because we want to keep the team open to everyone. You're on the team if you're participating in discussions and development, and you're not part of the team anymore if you decide you want to move on (which we hope won't happen).

Excited about joining the team? Here is more information on how to get started.

Meetings Schedule

We use IRC for our meetings, we meet on the OFTC network. (See detailed schedule for which channel; it varies by day.)

= Team Meetings = = UTC = = CEST = = EDT = = PDT = = AEST =
Primary team meeting (in #tor-meeting) Monday 17:00 Monday 19:00 Monday 13:00 Monday 10:00 Tuesday 03:00
Monthly retrospective (in #tor-meeting) Tuesday 20:00 Tuesday 22:00 Tuesday 16:00 Tuesday 13:00 Wednesday 06:00
Patch party (in #tor-dev) Wednesday 23:00 Thursday 01:00 Wednesday 19:00 Wednesday 16:00 Thursday 09:00
Optional catch-up (in #tor-dev) Thursday 10:00 Thursday 12:00 Thursday 06:00 Thursday 03:00 Thursday 20:00

(strikethrough means that most people in that timezone are asleep.)

The boldfaced time for a meeting is canonical in its time zone; the other times are computed and might not be correct for a given location depending on factors like daylight saving time. The primary meeting will track US daylight saving time. The canonical Patch Party time is in UTC and will not change with daylight saving time. The optional catch-up will track European daylight saving time.

If you want to participate, try to show up to the team meeting or patch party. Either one should be fine, though the primary meeting will be more attended. (If you need to meet during the optional catch-up, please let people know a few days in advance.) The meeting times are roughly 8 hours apart in the hopes that one will be convenient for each pair of time zones.

Also note that these meeting times are not permanent. We sometimes need to reconfigure them from time to time as developers join, as people's schedules change, and as the global daylight savings slouches across the face of the earth. See the tor-dev mailing list for updates.

For other type of meetings, see:

How we work

Besides meeting every week on IRC for status update and team discussions, our team also uses the following mechanisms to organize our work:

New features starts with proposals - normally we discuss them on ​tor-dev@ mailing list and try to finalize the discussions on IRC meetings.

How to find us

We have what we call 'patch parties' meetings, they are for any volunteer to come with patches they want to discuss or need review for. Check out the meetings information above for more details.

If you want to reach someone from the team between these meetings to ask a development-related question, just go to #tor-dev IRC channel, and somebody from the team might either be around or appear later and get back to you.

Our asynchronous medium of communication is the ​tor-dev@ mailing list. This list is public in the sense that anyone can subscribe, send emails and read archives. Feel free to subscribe and just listen if you want, and feel free to post if you have a question that you think is on topic.

Becoming a volunteer

Thanks for volunteering with us! This part of our wiki is a collection of information we believe might be useful for you who wants to help us develop our tools.

Getting started

You could start by submitting a patch! Patches can help you learn our code and how our team work.

Tips on finding a patch to work on

We have people on rotation triaging bugs every week, you could look for one of them online and ask for suggestions of what to work on.

Or you can dig it yourself! You are welcome to just create new tickets on https://trac.torproject.org if there is something in particular that you want to help with or a bug you found and has a patch for.

Tips on finding your way around our code

For the past couple years we spent great amount of our time documenting our code to help people understand it. Here are some links for documentation that will help you get started with our code!

HACKING/

The HACKING/ folder has helpful information about what you need to know to hack on Tor!

  • First, read GettingStarted.md to learn how to get a start in Tor development.
  • If you've decided to write a patch, CodingStandards.txt will give you a bunch of information about how we structure our code.
  • It's important to get code right! Reading WritingTests.md will tell you how to write and run tests in the Tor codebase.
  • There are a bunch of other programs we use to help maintain and develop the codebase: HelpfulTools.md can tell you how to use them with Tor.
  • If it's your job to put out Tor releases, see ReleasingTor.md so that you don't miss any steps!
  • A very important part of our development is code review, if you would like to collaborate with this part or want to sharp your skills in this front, check HowToReview.md.

tor-guts:

The core Tor development team created tor-guts, a compilation of chapters that aims to explain the general structure of the Tor codebase, how it fits together, what functionality is available for extending Tor, and gives some notes on how Tor got that way.

Some of the things we cover with this documentation:

  • Chapter 01e-os-compat.md covers networking and filesystems functions that helps us wrap differences between various operating systems we support.
  • Chapter 01d-crypto.md is dedicated to Lower-level cryptography functionality in Tor, in general Tor code shouldn't be calling crypto library directly (e.g. OpenSSL), this documentation helps developers understand the functions available in src/common/crypto*.c or src/common/tortls.c that they can use these libraries indirectly.
  • Chapter 01c-time.md cover Tor’s time-related functions, they exist to help developers parse time, or access cached time for when you have to do thousands of call and don’t want to overload the system, or information on how to schedule things.
  • Chapter 01g-strings.md it's full of functions for manipulating the C string abstraction. It contains some often-missed highlights that will be helpful for developers who learning the ‘tor way’ of doing things in order to collaborate with our code base.
  • Chapter 01b-collections.md talks about the different collections we have available and how these resources are useful when writing code for Tor.
  • Chapter 01a-memory.md describes Tor’s functions for memory management. We advise developers to never use 'malloc', 'calloc', 'realloc, or 'free' on their own; always use the variants prefixed with 'tor_'. We also explain Tor’s convention for when the developer is writing their own functions, and some other choices we have made to help collaborators understand them.

Modules and functions:

We use doxygen to generate documentation in html out of our comments on the code. With that we have documentation for all the modules in Tor, their data flows, their intended interactions, and their actual behaviors. As well as nearly all the functions.

You will find this documentation in two places:

  1. In the source code, at the start of each C file.
  2. When you click on individual C files under https://people.torproject.org/~nickm/tor-auto/doxygen/files.html (scroll down to "detailed description").

More on Network Team

Task Tracking

Older Releases

Tor Meetings

Resources

Processes and Policies

These policies are older than our meta-policy:

These processes are older than our meta-policy:

Policies:

Provisional policies:

Guidelines:

Active Sponsors and Contracts

Roadmap

The projects from sponsors/contracts that are making this work possible are:

Priorities

  1. security fixes for medium/high severity bugs [No sponsor]
  2. Regular releases [no sponsor] - Nick with help from Team
  3. sbws - Alex [No sponsor for Network Team, but sponsored for Juga] (support from Georg/GeKo )
  4. IPv6 Support [S55] - Nick, David
  5. Walking Onions specs [S69] - Nick
  6. Supporting S30 and S28 (anticensorship) work - Alex
  7. HS DoS defenses [No sponsor, yet?] - George & David (with a little Nick?)
  8. Library size reduction [No sponsor] - Alex & David (with a little Nick?)
  9. Google Summer of Code & Outreachy - Nickm, Alex

Other priorities (everybody):

  • community handling: 
    • volunteers
    • relay operators
    • answering email lists (tor-dev@, tor-relays@)
    • do support on irc? (#tor-dev, #tor, etc.)
  • fixing bugs for each release
    • release blockers
  • what else does other teams ask us for?
    • liaison with network health team (usually 1-2 hours a week for dgoulet)
  • Fixing bugs for android and iOS for the guardian project [see #33522 and #33837 for ios issues]
  • ongoing tech-debt reduction
  • Fixing windows bugs (ahf / ... others?):
    • [UTF-8/16 names in filepaths makes Tor unable to start: #10416]
    • Issues with mmap on some platform
    • issues with mmap leading to relays spinning on consdiffcache [#24857 #24857]
    • condition variable issue with 100% cpu [#30187 #30187]
    • Windows DLL load order (possibly a Tor Browser packaging bug) reproducible in CI [#33702, #33643]
  • Writing more grant proposals
  • Miscelaneous onion service tasks that require our attention
    • Onionbalance. Standardizing Onion-Location with the IETF. HTTPS-E
    • Ricochet Refresh support
  • Gitlab transition stuff for network-team related projects (ahf / gaba):
    • CI?
    • Code base movements: chutney, tor.git, fallback-scripts.git on Github and git.torproject.org, torsocks, trunnel
    • Code base movements (archive?): torflow, pytorctl, leekspin (+ dependencies), rpm-packaging
    • DirAuth and sbws to network health, TorDNSEL to metrics

Tickets for Roadmap Q2 2020

TicketQuery(keywords~=network-team-roadmap-2020Q2,format=progress)

[[TicketQuery(status=!closed,keywords=~network-team-roadmap-2020Q2,order=id,format=table,col=id|summary|status|owner|priority|points|sponsor,group=sponsor)]]

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