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

[Linus Nordberg]

Nick Mathewson <nickm at freehaven.net> wrote
Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:57:04 -0400:

| 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?

Sounds good to me.

Just a thought. A few of the directory authorities, I think at least
three, as well as the bridge authority run packages/ports only, not
builds from source. We'd have to package our -da branch ourselves for
those I guess. But that's probably a better option than the others.