On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 3:55 AM, Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org wrote:
On 12/17/13 10:31 PM, Nick Mathewson wrote:
147 Eliminate the need for v2 directories in generating v3 directories
This proposal explains a way that we can phase out the vestigial use of v2 directory documents in keeping authorities well-informed enough to generating the v3 consensus. It's still correct; somebody should implement it before the v2 directory code rots any further. (5/2011)This proposal looks plausible to me. Some minor remarks:
- The proposal suggests that authorities send an opinion document to the
other authorities "at the regular vote upload URL". URLs are cheap, why not use a different URL to keep things separated, e.g., /tor/post/opinion ?
sure.
- Should dir-spec.txt suggest a timing for pushing-and-pulling opinion
documents? Authorities could send their opinions at :45:00 and fetch missing opinions at :47:30. This could be defined by a new OpinionSeconds part contained in "voting-delay" lines. This would be a SHOULD requirement, not a MUST requirement.
This is plausible.
- The proposal doesn't say what lines must be contained in opinion
documents. It seems that an authority that parses an opinion document is only interested in a) relay fingerprint, b) descriptor publication time, and c) descriptor digest; unless there's more information that helps authorities decide whether "they might accept" a descriptor. If not, opinion documents only need to contain a small subset of headers and all the "r" lines that would be contained in a later vote.
This also seems okay. It would however mean that we can't use the same parsing logic as we use for regular votes.
- The proposal doesn't explicitly say this, so just to be sure: when an
authority finds that it's missing a router descriptor that it then downloads, it also downloads the corresponding extra-info descriptor afterwards, right?
I suppose it should.
- Another thing that is left implicit in the proposal: the opinion
document will always contain the valid-after time of the *next* consensus. Well, the URL /tor/status-vote/next/opinion implies that, but maybe we should explicitly mention this in dir-spec.txt.
Hm. maybe valid-after and valid-until should just get ignored on opinions. Or omitted.
Also, ISTR that Roger told me that this whole proposal didn't actually seem to be necessary in practice. I wish I could remember the rationale, though.
yrs,