I disagree. It's useful information to know if some authorities don't assign flags or assign extra flags to a relay. That can help explain why the relay sometimes gets the flag if some of the authorities don't vote. Or in case of Named/Unnamed and Exit/BadExit, the flags contained in votes can help explain why a relay gets the Named or Exit flag. There may be more examples. Sure, this is like debug information, and not many relay operators will understand what's going on there. But saying that the information contained in the table is not useful is not correct.
If we were to surface flag votes on a one-off basis then we should do so in Atlas. Actually, it would be pretty slick if hovering your mouse over the flags showed the votes for each authority. I still disagree that any except a vanishingly small group will find this useful, but if this is a use case we want to support then Atlas is the spot.
Consensuses and votes contain these lines:
valid-after 2013-09-25 13:00:00 fresh-until 2013-09-25 14:00:00 valid-until 2013-09-25 16:00:00
Thanks! Added a note to the ticket. It'll be a while before I can implement it, but definitely on my list of things I'd like to do.
Not sure if that's going to swim. Is it really a good use of Roger's time to write or adapt Python scripts? I guess he can answer that better than I (though I'm not sure it's a good use of his time to follow this thread ;)). However, we shouldn't be developing this tool just for Roger, because hopefully other people care about debugging the network, too. Just imagine what Tor devs would want to use whenever somebody shows up on #tor and asks why their relay doesn't have this or that flag, and imagine what's the easiest way to share results with the relay operator.
Is debugging the tor network a good use of Roger's time? I can't answer that. That said, if Roger is trying to answer exotic questions like "i wanted to know how many relays had a Running flag from those two authorities and no Running flag from any others" then I can tell you that scripting is the right answer. Not a huge table.
Learning to script both empowers Roger to solve harder problems and do so more efficiently. If he wants to answer the questions like the one above then he should either learn to script or ask me to do it.
Cheers! -Damian