torrc file changes and features - reversal request & possible bug.

[Nick Mathewson]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 01:01:08PM +0100, Anon Mus wrote:
 [...]
> But this latest version (at least) of tor deletes all the user comments 
> and also deletes all but the last line of any ExcludeNodes lines, all 
> other ExcludeNodes line details are lost.

Hi, Anon Mus.

Tor has never deleted comments on its own, unless a controller tells
it to save configuration changes.  However, Vidalia has never
preserved comments when saving configuration changes.  This isn't new
to the (rather old) 0.1.2.19.

I agree that it would be awesome to 

Preserving comments when altering a configuration file would be great,
but it turns out to be pretty hard.  We'd have to change the way that
Tor processes configuration files in order to detect comments before
options, and keep comments with their associated options, and keep
options in the same order, and detect where to insert new options in
order to minimize confusion.

It would be neat to do something like this, and I bet the Vidalia team
might be interested in patches to do it.

> Is there any way these can be changes can be reversed???
> 
> So that,
> 
> 1. Multiple ExcludeNodes lines are accepted and left as is in the torrc 
> file.

Does this still happen with any recent version of Vidalia?  If so, it
should go onto the vidalia bugtracker.

yrs,
-- 
Nick