On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 4:58 AM, Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org wrote:
On 12/17/13 10:31 PM, Nick Mathewson wrote:
177 Abstaining from votes on individual flags
Here's my proposal for letting authorities have opinions about some (flag,router) combinations without voting on whether _every_ router should have that flag. It's simple, and I think it's basically right. With more discussion and review, somebody could/should build it, I think. (11/2013)This proposal looks useful, too.
There's just one thing that surprised me in the proposal:
A flag is listed in the consensus if it is in the known-flags section of at least one voter, and in the known-flags or extra-flags section of at least three voters (or half the authorities, whichever set is smaller).
The previous requirement for a flag to be listed in the consensus was:
Known-flags is the union of all flags known by any voter.
If I'm not mistaken, the new requirement that at least three voters need to at least sometimes have an opinion on a flag is new, and it seems unrelated to being able to abstain from votes on individual flags. Even if nobody uses extra-flags, a flag that is only contained in two known-flags lines suddenly won't make it into the consensus when the new consensus method is used. I'm not saying this new requirement is bad, but I didn't expect it to be introduced in this proposal. Maybe there should be a separate (tiny) proposal that requires at least three voters to know a flag. Or maybe the overview of this proposal and a later ChangeLog entry and dir-spec.txt patch should state this new requirement more explicitly.
So, I think my reasoning here was that we should not allow any single authority to be a dictator for a flag, and we shouldn't let a single authority add a huge number of flags on their own.
We could split it into a new proposal, I guess. Want to write that?
peace,