Thus spake adrelanos (adrelanos@riseup.net):
Mike Perry:
In those situations (which are the real reason we're asking *before* connecting - we don't want those people to touch the public Tor network before giving them the option not to), simply checking their system proxy settings might not be sufficient. The user only needs their proxy to make Tor work.
Thought has been put into this before:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/2905/xxx-no-publi...
I was there for that disaster of a ticket, and wrote that outline. It took a solid month of endless discussion and back and forth (and 4 months wall-clock time) just to get that outline, and after all of that, people were still barely able to agree that the outline reflected the situation, let alone what they wanted to do with their own sub-project.
Seems that knowledge has been ignored when planing how tor-launcher should look like.
You'll note that from Line 75 of that outline you linked (that I wrote) describes exactly what this is: http://trial.pearlcrescent.com/tor/torlauncher/2013-05-03/FromBrowser/networ...
This thread is about exploring the idea of breaking that window into a Wizard and/or minimizing it further, because usability people have told us that a single pane with all of those questions is overwhelming at startup.
As for the rest of that outline, I'm not going through that mess again. The underlying Tor support for it is decided and implemented, and that was all that mattered in the first place anyway. Other projects that want to have their own Tor configuration can simply disable Tor Launcher, or patch it to do what they want.