Holy shit I caught 1

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 10:49:46PM -0500, Mike Perry wrote:
> An interface to suck a signature-verified directory out of Tor via the
> control-port or some other means would also be nice.

I noticed from your earlier statement that you're using the v1 directory
format. This is obsolete, and any v1 directories you may run across
will likely not contain complete information anymore (this includes the
output of the scripts at serifos, which haven't been upgraded yet). See
http://tor.eff.org/svn/trunk/doc/dir-spec.txt for the v2 format
(introduced in Tor 0.1.1.x), which involves fetching network-statuses
and server descriptors independently.

If you want your Tor controller to have up to date descriptors and
network statuses, you can

1) Read them out of the $datadir yourself, from "cached-routers*" and
"cached-status/*"

2) Listen for "newdesc" events, and ask us why there is no "newstatus"
event. (Good point, I've just put that on the todo list.)

3) Send "getinfo desc/all-recent" and "getinfo network-status". This
won't give you the full set of network-status strings though.

4) Turn on your dirport and send "getinfo dir/status/all" and
"getinfo dir/server/all".

Personally, I would go for #4. Note that for any of these, you may want
to set your FetchUselessDescriptors torrc variable (see man page).

(I'm using Tor 0.1.2.1-alpha. I don't recall if all of these are
implemented in the 0.1.1.x series, but it's possible they're not.)

> > Check out
> > https://tor-svn.freehaven.net/svn/torctl/trunk/python/
> 
> Ok, I will consider rewriting it for this python interface. Have to
> learn python first, which has been on my TODO list for some time, so
> hopefully it will happen. I would guess the directory notification
> interface won't appear for a while in Tor either, so I probably have
> time. When 0.1.2 stabilizes?

Yep. Especially if you help us figure out what interface you want. :)

--Roger