Hi everyone! Here is my status report for January 2023.

This month I worked on several small tasks to polish many small details, especially on the tor-browser-build repository. For example, I removed a shim used to launch tor on Tor Browser for macOS. It was used to declare some Python 2.x compatibility variables for obfs3, so it has not been needed for a long time [0]. Another macOS task was switching our DMG installers from ISO images to HFS filesystems to show a custom volume image [1]. This was quite involved because it introduced reproducibility issues, for which I had to patch the HFS creation to use a deterministic volume UUID [2]. All were part of a parent ticket about cleaning up the "Bundle-Data" directory of Tor Browser [3]. In a somehow related topic, I reviewed how we ship extensions [4]. Moving them to the distribution directory might allow us to enable some profile repair tools if needed, or multiple profiles.

On the Tor Browser side, I fixed a problem when running the browser for a long time [5]. I did not handle stdout correctly when switching from nsIProcess to Subprocess. Shoutout to the members of our community for finding the cause, and apologies for any inconvenience it caused! Then, I investigated and tried to remove some calls to home that we inherited from Firefox [6]. Finally, I went back to improving our portable profile directory patch. I feel we are reaching its final form.

Best, Pier

[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41569 [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/28... [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41549 [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40788