Hi Karsten, I've finally finished implementing stem's module for remote descriptor fetching. Its usage is pleasantly simple - see the example at the start of its docs...
https://stem.torproject.org/api/descriptor/remote.html https://stem.torproject.org/_modules/stem/descriptor/remote.html https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/7f050eb?hp=b6c23b0
The only part of our wiki plans that I regretted needing to drop is a local filesystem cache (the part that made me think twice was figuring out when to invalidate cached resources). Otherwise this turned into a pleasantly slick module.
Cheers! -Damian
PS. Where does an authority's v3ident come from? Presently I reference users to the values in config.c but that's mostly because I'm confused about what it is and how it differs from their fingerprint.