[tor-bugs] #7986 [Tor]: Lengthen the consensus validity interval

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#7986: Lengthen the consensus validity interval
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 Reporter:  nickm                    |          Owner:                    
     Type:  enhancement              |         Status:  needs_review      
 Priority:  major                    |      Milestone:  Tor: 0.2.4.x-final
Component:  Tor                      |        Version:                    
 Keywords:  tor-client 023-backport  |         Parent:  #2681             
   Points:                           |   Actualpoints:                    
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Comment(by arma):

 I want to see us put this feature in. It would be good for Tor.

 That said, I worry about several classes of bugs we're likely to see.

 The most important class of bug is "decide we don't want a directory
 object, throw it out, realize we want it, fetch it, goto step 0". If we
 have some logic somewhere that decides a relay descriptor isn't useful if
 it's 36 hours out-of-date, but we have one referenced from our consensus,
 we're in for some sad times. I vaguely recall that in the past we had
 exactly this issue: we had a plan to make it so if the descriptor is still
 referenced by the consensus, it didn't matter if it was more than 24 hours
 old. We nearly implemented that plan, but ran into problems of the sort in
 this paragraph and backed out. I don't think we've fixed any of those
 problems since then.

 The less exciting but still relevant class of bug is "don't admit to
 having a descriptor if it's more than 24 hours old". For example, we have
 one of those right now with this branch:
 networkstatus_getinfo_by_purpose() won't list any relays or bridges whose
 descriptors are more than 24 hours old. What others do we have like that?

 So, how to proceed? I think the most important question for me is how Tor
 can recognize that it's hit one of the "drop and refetch and drop" bugs.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7986#comment:8>
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