Hi, I'm trying to put up an ebuild for the Tor Browser Bundle for Gentoo. As you may know an ebuild is a script which automates the build of a certain application. We already have something in Portage [2] (the official ebuild repository) but it's in an experimental state and we want to make sure that it's something useful and not harmful.
So I'd like to know your opinion about the idea as whole (is it a good idea at all to build by yourself the TBB instead of using the official one?) and what could be the main problems arising in such an operation. So:
1. Can you name a list of tools to fingerprint a browser so we can compare our ebuild with the official TBB? 2. Which version should we use? We were planning to offer both the current official release (even if TBB for Linux is currently in beta) and something more recent, even if AFAIK this would be for testing purpose only and could weaken anonymity and untrackability. 3. We plan to use the system version of the Tor client, in my understanding it should not be a problem to use a Tor client with a version different from the one officially released, but I could be wrong. We also plan to exclude vidalia (and the "0015-Make-Tor-Browser-exit-when-not-launched-from-Vidalia.patch" patch). 4. We have a different ebuild for the Firefox profile directory (so if it's not installed the HTTPS Everywhere plugin won't be installed), is this a good idea or would it be better to integrate them? 5. Gentoo build system offers USE flags, which are options that allow to customize the way the package is built. These are the USE flag available for the standard Firefox ebuild in Gentoo, which is the base for our build of the TBB: 1. alsa: Adds support for media-libs/alsa-lib (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) 2. bindist: Disable official Firefox branding (icons, name) which are not binary-redistributable according to upstream. 3. custom-cflags: Build with user-specified CFLAGS (unsupported) 4. custom-optimization: Fine-tune custom compiler optimizations, setting this is not recommended. 5. dbus: Enable dbus support for anything that needs it (gpsd, gnomemeeting, etc) 6. debug: Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml 7. ipc: Use inter-process communication between tabs and plugins. Allows for greater stability in case of plugin crashes 8. libnotify: Enable desktop notification support 9. minimal: Prevent sdk and headers from being installed 10. pgo: Add support for profile-guided optimization using gcc-4.5, for faster binaries. This option will double the compile time. 11. startup-notification: Enable application startup event feedback mechanism 12. system-sqlite: Use the system-wide dev-db/sqlite installation with secure-delete enabled 13. webm: Use system media-libs/libvpx for HTML5 WebM video support. 14. wifi: Enable wireless network functions
Looking at the TBB build script this the combination of USE flags to make as similar as possible to the official release (minus means the USE flag is disabled): -pgo -debug -bindist -custom-optimization -crashreporter webm ipc system-sqlite -wifi. I'm planning to remove the possibility to configure these use flags. Do you agree? For further details you can take a look at the ebuild [1], which should be understandable. Take a look also at the current ebuild for TBB [2].
Is there something else we should pay attention to in the build process or in general?
Thanks in advance, Alessandro Di Federico
[1] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/www-client/firefox/f... http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/mozconfig-3.e... [2] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/www-client/torbrowse...