[tor-dev] Proposals should have reviews. Let's make sure that happens. Here's a schedule.

[Nick Mathewson]

So, one of the longstanding problems with Tor's (change) proposal
system has been that proposals sit around for a long time without
sufficient discussion or approval.  When they're about to be
implemented, we do an informal "hey did anybody look at that?" check,
but that's not really good enough.

Here's what I've been thinking of doing, as discussed at the tor dev
IRC meeting yesterday.

1. Everybody who will review proposals* should nominate one or two
proposals currently in state "Open" or "Draft".  People should
nominate proposals that they themselves didn't write.

2. I'll schedule review & discussion sessions, about one per week,
trying to hit times where interested people can make it.  Everybody
who will review proposals* should try to show up if they can, having
read the proposal or proposals under discussion for that week.  Then
we talk about the proposal(s)!

3. We'll try to move nominated proposals towards "Accepted" or
"Rejected", improving them as necessary.

* I'm not going to be too elitist here, but:  If you show up and
contribute usefully to discussions, I will prioritize your nominations
more than I will prioritize nominations from people who don't
contribute so much.


This is a draft process, so we'll try to see after a month or two
(possibly at the next face-to-face dev meeting?) how it's going.

Here's the schedule I have in mind for the  first meeting, based on
proposals already nominated at the IRC dev meeting.  I'm going to go a
bit aggressively for the first couple of weeks, so that we can get a
sense of how this process works out.  Everything is subject to change.
We'll be putting notes online from these meetings.

  Tuesday January 19:   11am Eastern (1600 UTC)

      Guard node proposals!  We'll be talking about these proposals:
       Prop#259: New Guard Selection Behaviour [DRAFT]
       Prop#241: Resisting guard-turnover attacks [DRAFT]
       Prop#247:  Defending Against Guard Discovery Attacks using
Vanguards [DRAFT]

  Friday January 22:   11 am Eastern (1600 UTC)

     Prop#251: Padding for netflow record resolution reduction [DRAFT]

  Monday January 25: 8pm Eastern (0100 UTC on Tuesday Jan 26)

      Prop#250: Random Number Generation During Tor Voting [DRAFT]

  Friday January 29:  8:30 am eastern (1330 UTC)

     Prop#252: Single Onion Services [DRAFT]
     Prop#260: Rendezvous Single Onion Services [DRAFT]
     Prop#246: Merging Hidden Service Directories and Introduction Points [OPEN]


Also nominated are:

    Prop#264: Putting version numbers on the Tor subprotocols [OPEN]
    Prop#257: Refactoring authorities and taking parts offline [DRAFT]
    Prop#258: Denial-of-service resistance for directory authorities [OPEN]


-- 
Nick