Hi, all!
Here's an idea I had for directory authorities and the 0.2.3 release series.
"As you know Bob," Tor 0.2.3 will be stable very soon, and I'm hoping not to take any more patches for it except for important security issues. I want 0.2.4 to come out very early next year. But in the meantime, to support 0.2.4, and to deploy security/reliability features to the network early, there are some directory consensus features that we'd want to deploy before the rest of 0.2.4 is done and stable.
In particular, I'd like directories to be able to reach consensus on IPv6 addresses (6363), and I'd like to try out the code that Mike wrote to make the bandwidth voting system more robust against dishonest during its startup phase (2286).
So here's my plan: Make a "maint-0.2.3-da" branch based on 0.2.3, plus feature patches for directory authorities. It gets patches from the stable series (0.2.3), plus directory-authority features under development. It would get merged-forward into 0.2.4, to make sure that 0.2.3-da and 0.2.4 behavior stay in sync.
This way we can get new authority features working in time to support 0.2.4 clients, but without forcing too many authorities to run 0.2.4 before it's ready, and without forcing us to make feature changes in 0.2.3 proper.
Thoughts?
yrs,