[tor-dev] Parallel release series for directory authorities?

[Nick Mathewson]

Hi, all!

Here's an idea I had for directory authorities and the 0.2.3 release series.

"As you know Bob," Tor 0.2.3 will be stable very soon, and I'm hoping
not to take any more patches for it except for important security
issues.  I want 0.2.4 to come out very early next year.  But in the
meantime, to support 0.2.4, and to deploy security/reliability
features to the network early, there are some directory consensus
features that we'd want to deploy before the rest of 0.2.4 is done and
stable.

In particular, I'd like directories to be able to reach consensus on
IPv6 addresses (6363), and I'd like to try out the code that Mike
wrote to make the bandwidth voting system more robust against
dishonest during its startup phase (2286).

So here's my plan: Make a "maint-0.2.3-da" branch based on 0.2.3, plus
feature patches for directory authorities.  It gets patches from the
stable series (0.2.3), plus directory-authority features under
development.  It would get merged-forward into 0.2.4, to make sure
that 0.2.3-da and 0.2.4 behavior stay in sync.

This way we can get new authority features working in time to support
0.2.4 clients, but without forcing too many authorities to run 0.2.4
before it's ready, and without forcing us to make feature changes in
0.2.3 proper.

Thoughts?

yrs,
-- 
Nick