On 14 Aug 2015, at 03:10 , nusenu nusenu@openmailbox.org wrote:
Changing the code to return the mean of the two center elements from even arrays would break all authority voting, and wouldn't actually be useful.
Yes, that is what Sebastian said on IRC as well. Can you shed some light as to why it would break voting?
If the authorities supply different values in the consensus, voting breaks.
Authorities using the low-median would supply one value, and authorities using the mean-median would supply another value. (Authorities typically run different versions of tor, and don't upgrade all at once.)
Breaking changes like this are typically negotiated among the authorities using numbered consensus methods. Once enough authorities support a new consensus method, it is activated during voting.
Rather than creating a new consensus method to implement mean-median, it's much easier to patch the documentation to specify low-median. (And I see no significant gain in changing from low-median to mean-median.)
I'd rather see bandwidth measurements become more accurate, for more relays, more of the time, than change how their median is defined.
Tim
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
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