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

[Damian Johnson]

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

No doubt I'm missing something basic about either the problem we're
trying to solve or how votes work. :P

What I meant by a "specialized DirPort method" was the methods in
section 4.2 ('/tor/status-vote/current/consensus' and friends). My
rough guess from the proposal is that the trouble is...

1. A new relay publishes their descriptor to a single authority. (?)
2. The authority communicates the new descriptor to the rest via their
v2 document.
3. Authorities now have an enumeration of all relays, and generate their vote.

... and we don't want #2 to use v2 documents. If that's the case then
the simple solution seems to be something like...

2. When an authority receives a descriptor it forwards it to all the
other authorities.

My understanding is that votes don't need to precisely match. If a
descriptor comes in during the window where votes take place then
that's fine - the majority of authorities won't have it and it simply
won't be included until the following consensus.

Cheers! -Damian