Proposal: Network status entries need a new Unnamed flag

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 07:08:54PM -0400, Nick Mathewson wrote:
> Another thing to consider is that this means we need vote protocol
> migration.  I'll spec that.  Do you think it needs a proposal?

Only if think you might have gotten it wrong. ;)

>  The
> basic problem is that, since Unnamed and Named are set differently
> from other flags, existing authorities won't generate them properly,
> and so old authorities and authorities that implement proposal 122
> will generate different consensuses, and so no consensus will get all
> the signatures.  The solution is for each authority to list in its
> vote a list of "voting protocols" that it knows how to generate
> consensuses with.  When generating the consensus, the authorities use
> the highest-numbered protocol listed by at least 2/3 of the votes.

Ok.

> We could just write the code and upgrade the 2 current v3 authorities
> simultaneously.  But IMO it's a good idea to get this solved now,
> because if we need to add any new voting rules once the whole v3
> directory system is fully deployed, we'll be in rather a bit of hurt.

Patching the two running v3 authorities for this particular issue,
and getting voting protocol versioning in place for the future, seem
orthogonal to me. Meaning: feel free to do them in whatever order
seems best.

Thanks,
--Roger