* Mark Smith mcs@pearlcrescent.com [2013:12:19 11:06 -0500]:
I missed the fact that old configuration was present under ~/Library/Vidalia/ Sorry about that. After removing ~/Library/Vidalia, I see the same problem you see.
Things seems to work if I create a directory structure like this: Vidalia/Vidalia.app Vidalia/Data/vidalia.conf and use the following as the initial contents of vidalia.conf:
[General] LanguageCode=en
[Tor] ControlPort=9151 AuthenticationMethod=cookie
and then start vidalia from a shell so I can pass -datadir like this: cd Vidalia ./Vidalia.app/Contents/MacOS/Vidalia -datadir ./Data
Are you trying to avoid patching Vidalia or could we modify it to look next to itself for its data directory (e.g., use ./Data instead of ~/Library/Vidalia by default)? If that was done, we could just ship Vidalia.app and Data/vidalia.conf.
See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8811 for an older patch (which would need to be modified, but which shows the code we would need to change).
Ah, this is great! I was unaware of this ticket.
I am 100% fine with patching Vidalia and I like this more than I like the idea of merely changing its default ControlPort (which would be a very easy but kind of hacky change to make).
I will take further discussion about OSX and other packaging concerns for these bundles to #8811, because for example I think people might have the expectation that a standalone Vidalia will not write outside of its directory, and as far as I know for the current setup that is not the case.