Proposal: Provide diffs between consensuses

[Nick Mathewson]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 12:44:03AM +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote:
 [...]
>   - Do we agree on using the ed patch format?

I finally figured out what questions I wanted to answer this question
with. :)

There are two things we want in a patch format:

  1. There needs to be a spec for generating and applying patches.
     The spec for generating them needs to be deterministic (or have a
     deterministic variant) so that authorities can all generate the
     same patch.

  2. There should be a good Free Software library (3BSD-like license,
     ideally) to generate and apply patches.  We'll be way happier if
     we don't have to write this code ourselves, I think: string
     processing like this can get really grungy.  In a pinch, we might
     get away with shelling out for generating patches (since only
     authorities need to do that), but clients need to be able to do
     it themselves safely, and we'll be in luck if we don't have to 
     reinvent the wheel here.

thoughts?  How do ed patches stack up in these areas?
-- 
Nick