[tor-dev] Prevoting opinions suggested in proposal 147 (was: Dusting off dir-spec.txt)

[Karsten Loesing]

On 1/5/14 7:13 PM, Damian Johnson wrote:
>> For example, status opinions (proposal 147)...
> 
> Hi Karsten. Just looked at 147 to figure out the context for
> overhauling the dir-spec

Hi Damian,

proposal 147 was just one example.  Another example is proposal 164
which suggests to add vote infos as another status document type.
Changing the thread subject to reflect that we're talking about proposal
147 here.

> and I'm curious about if we really need a new
> document type for this. I'm not clear from the proposal - which
> problem are we trying to solve?
> 
> 1. Relays publish their descriptor to a single authority, but that
> authority has no way of notifying the rest beside their v2 document.
> 
> 2. Generally all authorities *do* inform each other of the
> descriptors, but might be off by one or two. We want a method for them
> to be fully in sync besides a v2 document prior to a vote.

I'd say 1.  Even with prevoting opinions exchanged minutes before
generating votes there's no guarantee that no new relays appear and send
their descriptors only to a subset of authorities.  But prevoting
opinions mitigate the problem by reducing the window from 1 hour to a
few minutes.

> In both cases a specialized DirPort method to relay the descriptor
> data seems appropriate rather than inventing a new document type.

I'm not sure what you mean by "specialized DirPort method".  Can you
explain that in more detail?

Also, if you're curious about proposal 147, see my review on this list
from a few weeks ago:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005986.html

All the best,
Karsten