On 9/4/19 22:43, teor wrote:
Hi Mike,
Here's some other reasons that might affect a few operators:
On 5 Sep 2019, at 12:11, Mike Perry mikeperry@torproject.org wrote:
Unfortunately, we still have something like 2500 relays on either Tor 0.2.9-LTS or Tor 0.3.5-LTS.
What are the reasons for this? My guess is the top 5 most common responses are:
- "I didn't know that Debian's backports repo has latest-stable Tor!"
- "I didn't see the Tor Project repos mentioned in Tor's Relay docs!"
- "I'm running a distribution that Tor Project doesn't have repos for."
- "I rolled my own custom Tor from git and forgot about it."
- "My relay machine was not getting any updates at all. Oops."
Does anyone have a reason that they think many other relay operators also share?
- When I tried to update, it didn't work with my old config
- I need features that only exist in older Tors
- I can think of Tor2web, there may be others
- I am maintaining research or other patches against tor, and rebases are difficult
Regarding my relays, which currently are [0]
- Two were stuck on 0.3.4.11 because I had to install Tor from source on that machine and am bad about updating it (just updated) - Two are stuck on 0.3.5.7 because research and rebasing to new versions is liable to create inconsistencies and general doubt about results
[0]: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/contact:pastly
How can we fix that for you, or at least, how can we make it easier to run the very latest stable series Tor on your relay?
This is a huge ask and I don't expect anything to come of this suggestion, but:
Auto updates from within Tor itself (not relying on distro package managers). Put it behind a torrc option, allow the authorities to tell relays with the option enabled to download a new tor binary from $PLACE, create a bunch of infrastructure that builds Tor for all supported platforms reliably and efficiently, use a bunch of signatures everywhere so nothing bad can happen, done. So easy a caveman could do it, nothing bad could ever happen, absolutely no downsides, it's $CURRENT_YEAR so why don't we have this, etc. etc.