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

[Jacob Appelbaum]

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,
> 

I think this is a fine plan - my preference is generally to track git
tip for urras. I'm happy to track whatever branches need experimenting
or lots of use. I will need to acquire some IPv6 space for the machine
soon for it to be of maximal usefulness in the future....

All the best,
Jake