[tor-dev] Making microdescriptor tarballs available on metrics.tpo

[Karsten Loesing <karsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Damian, hi devs,

I'm planning to make microdescriptor tarballs available on the metrics
website that contain both microdescriptor consensuses and microdescriptors.

Some background: Recent Tor clients don't download the network status
consensus and full server descriptors anymore, but instead download the
microdescriptor consensus and the microdescriptors referenced from it.
We didn't provide these formats on the metrics website yet, because they
are derived from the formats we already provide and don't contain
anything novel.  But having the new formats will, for example, make it
easier for developers to analyze the directory protocol and for
researchers to understand what information is available to clients to
make path selection decisions.  If you need more background, see #2785
and search for "microdesc" in dir-spec.txt.

Here's a sample tarball:

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/microdescs-2014-01.tar.bz2

Damian, can you try to parse these descriptors using stem, to see if the
descriptor annotations are correct and if stem can parse them without
issues?

If all goes well, microdescriptor tarballs will start to be available on
the metrics website before the end of the month.

All the best,
Karsten
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