gratuitous change blocks upgrade to 0.2.2.15-alpha :-(

[Scott Bennett <bennett@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     I had planned to upgrade my node from 0.2.2.14-alpha this evening to
0.2.2.15-alpha, but there is an unfortunate and apparently gratuitous, new
restriction upon "ExcludeNodes" and "ExcludeExitNodes" that, for the moment
at least, is preventing me from upgrading.  I have a rather long list of
nodes that I have found undesirable in ways that justify (to me, at least,
and my opinion rules on my node) their inclusion in one or the other of
those lists.
     After building 0.2.2.15-alpha and installing it, I ran the usual
"tor --verify-config" as a basic test.  Surprise!  It issued many messages
of each of the following types:

Sep 10 01:15:29.753 [warn] Option 'ExcludeExitNodes' used more than once; all but the last value will be ignored.
Sep 10 01:15:29.753 [warn] Option 'ExcludeNodes' used more than once; all but the last value will be ignored.

There is no way that I can fit all of the excluded nodes of each type onto
a single line for each type in my torrc.  Also, my torrc is full of comment
lines documenting the reasons for these exclusions in each case, which
allows me to review certain ones from time to time for possible removal from
whichever list they are on and also to know which ones should never be
removed.  Even if an editor were available that could handle line lengths
great enough to allow placement of each entire list onto a single line in
torrc, the comments would have to be left out or made useless by being
separated from the corresponding node identifiers.
     The upshot is that I cannot upgrade to a version of tor that has this
new and seemingly unnecessary change. :-(  This is especially irritating
at the moment, given that 0.2.2.14-alpha has a bug that causes it from time
to time to drastically miscalculate the cutoff time for building new circuits.
For example, a couple of days ago, it suddenly changed from cutoff times on
the order of 12 to 14 seconds to cutoff times ranging from 130 to 300 seconds.
     To the developers:  please fix the next release of -alpha to allow the
use of multiple ExcludeExitNodes and ExcludeNodes lines again.  Thank you.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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* Internet:       bennett at cs.niu.edu                              *
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