[tor-bugs] #17321 [CollecTor]: Index to better support downloaders

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#17321: Index to better support downloaders
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 Reporter:  atagar       |          Owner:  karsten
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  accepted
 Priority:  High         |      Milestone:
Component:  CollecTor    |        Version:
 Severity:  Major        |     Resolution:
 Keywords:               |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:               |         Points:
  Sponsor:               |
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Comment (by karsten):

 Ease of production is not a good reason, but I think writing a parser is
 also more complicated if field names are dynamic.  That might not be the
 case with Python, but at least for Java/Gson it seems easier to just
 define a few classes with (statically named) attributes and let Gson do
 some magic to parse a JSON string for you.  I don't know about other
 languages/libraries.

 It's also not clear that looking up a specific directory or file by name
 is the only use case for applications.  It could also be that applications
 go through the entire list to see which files have changed, and they could
 stop at paths they don't care about.  Or they could go through the full
 list once we have "type" information and do something with all files of a
 given descriptor type.  Many choices, so it's not clear whether we should
 try to optimize for the path lookup use case, especially if it has
 downsides like more complex parsers.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17321#comment:15>
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