Improve torflow engineering quality and deployment procedure
This ticket used to be about improving all dirauth scripts, but now it's specific to torflow.
From talking to Sebastian and weasel, it seems to me that dirauth operators are having trouble sysadmining all these little dirauth scripts. Furthermore, many of the dirauth operators are not even running scripts like bw measurement, because of the pain of setting them up and supporting them.
With #9321 (moved) introducing another script, and with #8244 (moved) requiring yet another script. And with the peerflow system that might replace the bw auths, it seems that we will need to find a solution to this problem. Otherwise, only 1-2 dirauth ops (that are also Tor devs) will run each script, which is not good.
Unfortunately, I don't have a very good solution to propose here.
The obviously bad idea would be to bake all these scripts into little-t-tor. But this scales terribly, and we all have hopes for making Tor more modular and this will just be a step backwards.
Another idea that is still not very good but maybe more implementable, is to revisit all these scripts and make them work with minimal setup effort. Then make debian packages that auto-work for all of them (or just a big meta-package), and ask dirauth operators to install them. Then assign someone to be the maintainer of all those scripts so that they take care of them when they break or when dirauth ops need help. However, it's unclear how many of these scripts can just auto-work without manual setup or how much Debian hackery that would involve, or whether all dirauth ops use APT-based systems.
At the same time we could make it more clear which dirauths are running which scripts, so that we can incorporate it as part of consensus health and warn dirauths ops that are not running certain scripts or have not updated them. Also, the "make Tor architecture more modular" giga-project might help here, since we could define a custom interface for all these scripts, and make it easier to plug them in Tor without torrc hacks. Also, maybe simply having a nice wiki page with all the current scripts and good INSTALL instructions might actually be effective.
What else could we do here that would make dirauths more happy?