Paul Stauffer:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 09:27:24AM +0100, Georg Koppen wrote:
Thanks for asking. Well, on the positive side, we actually have this repository back[1] thanks to a volunteer spending time on the packaging effort. [1] https://rpm.torproject.org/
Cool, good to know. How much of a commitment is there to maintain that repo? If this volunteer moves on to other things, is it certain that someone else will pick it up? Would you recommend using this repo for guard / exit nodes, to keep up with the latest and greatest features? Or is it better for such nodes to stick with an LTS version for greater stability?
For the maintenance question: it is not a random volunteer that showed up who is maintaining our RPMs but what we call a core member of our project. That means someone being longer involved and better integrated into our community. Sure, there is still the risk that they move on and someone needs to pick this up (again) but right now I am not worried about that scenario. Moreover, we have some interest in maintaining support for RPMs given our network health efforts and the better diversity we get by Tor relays running on CentOS systems and not only on, say, Ubuntu/Debian as far as Linux is concerned.
For using LTS vs. non-LTS: there is no policy yet to recommend one over the other (although there might come one in the nearer future in favor of non-LTS Tor used on relays) but we feel relays should track regular releases, if possible, as we get that way performance and stability improvements etc. faster out which benefits our users. There is the potential flip side here as this could be hurting relay diversity, but overall we think that's worth it. Thus, if you can, please track non-LTS releases.
Georg