Implement obtaining server descriptors from the live network
Working on tpo/network-health/margot#13 (comment 2905118) I realized i can't just change tor client config as I do with stem and set UseMicrodescriptors 0
to download the server descriptors.
@nickm explained to me by irc, it isn't planned to implement that option in arti. However it's currently possible to parse NS consensus, which list server descriptors and parse the descriptors, just tor-dirmgr doesn't invoke something like that.
As he also pointed out, there're a lot of corner cases (retrying failures, caching things, expiring the cache, restarting when the consensus is out-of-date, ...) if we'd implement a quick downloader.
@gk and I think this is an important issue to be able to move away stem in our tools. @rishadbaniya has just run into the same issue to work on https://gitlab.torproject.org/rishadbaniya/erpc/-/issues/1. @hiro would also need it to replace metrics tools.
Is this feature possible in the next few months or at some point in the future?