Hello all,
In an attempt to make Pluggable Transports more accessible to other people, and to have a spec that is more applicable and useful to other projects that seek to use Pluggable Transports for circumvention, I have drafted a re-write of the spec.
This is not intended to alter existing behavior, but instead make it clear that the whole "Pluggable Transports" thing isn't just for Tor.
Unless people have serious objections, this will replace the existing PT spec, to serve as a stop-gap while the next revision of the PT spec (that does alter behavior) is being drafted/implemented.
Regards,
Excellent work on the rewrite. To summarize for those that do not have time to read the whole document, it's the same spec, it's just been rewritten to read more clearly. I think it's a great improvement over the previous version.
I have two suggestions:
Section 4, "Tor Configuration", I think should be moved into another document and a reference should be added instead. While it's useful for developers reading the PT spec to see how to configure their Tor nodes so they can test their PTs, this information is going to be used mostly by bridge operators. Bridge operators shouldn't have to go to the PT spec to figure out how to configure their bridge. PT developers though will need to configure a bridge anyway, so I think it's sensible to at the end of the PT spec send them to the bridge configuration documentation and the PT configuration section specifically.
Section 6 "Future Improvements" I think should be moved into a PT roadmap document. There is a lot to discuss regarding future improvements. My list for the most part does not overlap with this list. We could engage in healthy debate over what should go in the future improvements section, but this seems to me to be something better done when drafting a roadmap document rather than in the spec. It would of course be useful to add a reference to any roadmap documentation at the end of the spec.
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 8:19 AM, Yawning Angel yawning@schwanenlied.me wrote:
Hello all,
In an attempt to make Pluggable Transports more accessible to other people, and to have a spec that is more applicable and useful to other projects that seek to use Pluggable Transports for circumvention, I have drafted a re-write of the spec.
This is not intended to alter existing behavior, but instead make it clear that the whole "Pluggable Transports" thing isn't just for Tor.
Unless people have serious objections, this will replace the existing PT spec, to serve as a stop-gap while the next revision of the PT spec (that does alter behavior) is being drafted/implemented.
Regards,
-- Yawning Angel
tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 10:04:24 -0500 Brandon Wiley brandon@blanu.net wrote:
Excellent work on the rewrite. To summarize for those that do not have time to read the whole document, it's the same spec, it's just been rewritten to read more clearly. I think it's a great improvement over the previous version.
I have two suggestions:
Section 4, "Tor Configuration", I think should be moved into another document and a reference should be added instead. While it's useful for developers reading the PT spec to see how to configure their Tor nodes so they can test their PTs, this information is going to be used mostly by bridge operators. Bridge operators shouldn't have to go to the PT spec to figure out how to configure their bridge. PT developers though will need to configure a bridge anyway, so I think it's sensible to at the end of the PT spec send them to the bridge configuration documentation and the PT configuration section specifically.
Ok, I'll carve it off to a different document. To be honest I think it's somewhat redundant to have the documentation at all (since it's just a bunch of torrc directives), and there's better places for configuration documentation (like the man page).
Section 6 "Future Improvements" I think should be moved into a PT roadmap document. There is a lot to discuss regarding future improvements. My list for the most part does not overlap with this list. We could engage in healthy debate over what should go in the future improvements section, but this seems to me to be something better done when drafting a roadmap document rather than in the spec. It would of course be useful to add a reference to any roadmap documentation at the end of the spec.
The things listed there are the things that need to happen from Tor's perspective, and I'm not currently considering a huge "Change All The Things" type of rework if we were to bump the spec version. But I'll remove the section as unnecessary for now.
Regards,
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 9:19 AM, Yawning Angel yawning@schwanenlied.me wrote:
Hello all,
In an attempt to make Pluggable Transports more accessible to other people, and to have a spec that is more applicable and useful to other projects that seek to use Pluggable Transports for circumvention, I have drafted a re-write of the spec.
This is not intended to alter existing behavior, but instead make it clear that the whole "Pluggable Transports" thing isn't just for Tor.
Unless people have serious objections, this will replace the existing PT spec, to serve as a stop-gap while the next revision of the PT spec (that does alter behavior) is being drafted/implemented.
This looks like a clear improvement over the existing writeup. I'd suggest that not block on making it better, and merge what we have. Improvements as discussed elsewhere in the thread would rock, but IMO this is already delivering enough benefit that I'd say "let's go for it!"
Possible suggestion: call it spec version 1.1, and have it mention its relationship to the previous version of the spec.
cheers,
-
Brandon Wiley -
Nick Mathewson -
Yawning Angel