Re: gratuitous change blocks upgrade to 0.2.2.15-alpha :-(

[Scott Bennett <bennett@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:39:44 -0400 Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 01:36:18AM -0500, Scott Bennett wrote:
>>      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.
>
>> 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.
>
>The ChangeLog entry in question is:
>    - Warn when the same option is provided more than once in a torrc
>      file, on the command line, or in a single SETCONF statement, and
>      the option is one that only accepts a single line. Closes bug 1384.
>
>>      To the developers:  please fix the next release of -alpha to allow the
>> use of multiple ExcludeExitNodes and ExcludeNodes lines again.  Thank you.
>
>As I understand it, we changed no behavior except printing out a warn
>for people who had multiple lines, to tell them that they're expecting
>behavior that they're not getting.

     [extremely shocked pause...]
	.
	.
	.
     Roger, please tell me that you're joking.  I have *never* had the
understanding from reading the documentation in all of the years I've been
using tor that only a single line of each type would be used.  How, then,
are we to exclude all of the nodes that we find unacceptable for use in our
own circuits?
     If what you say is actually the case, then it would seem that a problem
described on this list on many occasions during the last few years may, in
fact, have been due to this horrible limitation.  Several of us have complained
on numerous occasions that adding a node to one list or the other and sending
SIGHUP to tor (or restarting it) failed to prevent that node from being used
in the manner that we had expressly excluded.  If what you say is indeed the
case, then it is a truly awful design bug.
>
>Can you confirm?
>
     I'm not a tor developer, so no, I cannot confirm.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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