Re: [tor-talk] torrc consistency

[bertagaz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 02:30:28PM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 
> See the discussion at
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2325

Yeah, found this ticket right after my first mail. Was waiting to see how
the discussion ends over here before/whether considering dumping there its
result. :)

> The "right" way to read or write the torrc file is to ask Tor to do it
> for you, via the controller interface. Then you never have to care about
> the format questions.

Sure, but the controller is not activated by default when installing Tor,
so it wouldn't always work if one isn't using it.

> But that said, Tor blows away user-written comments when it does a
> 'saveconf'. So that answer doesn't address your questions either.
> 
> Which users did you have in mind as your target audience?

I don't really think of a target audience. I'm not at all asking that
Tor's code checks the torrc format and its comment either.

I'm just considering while writing a Model::Config for Tor that it would
be far easier if at least the upstream torrc had some consistency. That
would also help every other tool/project that might need to modify this
file, without using the tor controller. See arm's code and how many lines
of it are dedicated to this job...

I guess it's just a consideration brought by the kind of tool
Config::Model or augeas are, and how it finally might require *every*
project to have some kind of policy for its config file. If not, that make
the goals of this neat tools far harder to reach. Not impossible, but
using far more work.

Speaking of it, I'll maybe rather try to do an augeas lens for torrc, then
used by Config::Model, as there are some python bindings to augeas, that
might interest arm's dev to use this mechanism. ;)

So my point was just to say maybe that could of an interest to just clean
the torrc file in the git repo and try to follow some simple rules when
modifying it in there. That's all, and that's something like a commit
modifying 3 or 4 lines, but that would make the job far easier for a lot
of people.

I don't intend to put pressure on anyone in the project with this
considerations though, was just trying to push some ideas this work raised
in my mind.

bert.

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