[tor-bugs] #2848 [Tor bundles/installation]: Ship TBB-Firefox as a separately downloadable package

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki torproject-admin at torproject.org
Fri Apr 8 13:03:52 UTC 2011


#2848: Ship TBB-Firefox as a separately downloadable package
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 Reporter:  rransom                   |          Owner:  erinn
     Type:  defect                    |         Status:  new  
 Priority:  normal                    |      Milestone:       
Component:  Tor bundles/installation  |        Version:       
 Keywords:                            |         Parent:  #2844
   Points:                            |   Actualpoints:       
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Comment(by erinn):

 Replying to [comment:3 rransom]:
 >  * We need to build our customized Firefox anyway; putting out a
 separate Firefox-only tarball for expert users is easy.

 It's easy but also time-consuming, because custom Firefox builds, while
 done as part of my normal release process, do not come with any of the
 extensions beforehand. Each one has different ways of handling extensions,
 different directories, and I don't think it's as simple as merely
 distributing the built version that I use as a basis for TBB.

 To go into more detail: the Linux bundles require the extensions to be in
 ~/.mozilla, and OS X ~/Library, so we reset $HOME in the launch script. If
 we want to ship FF-only packages, does that imply the ability to launch
 the same way? If not, how do you propose we get the extensions out to
 people and make sure they get used? There's the possibility to just
 unzip/untar into the user's home directory, but I am very uncomfortable
 with that.

 There's also the upload time involved -- maybe not a huge issue overall,
 but right now we're talking about Firefox builds for:

 Firefox 4: i386 Linux, x86_64 Linux, i386 OS X, x86_64 OS X, Windows
 Firefox 3.6: i386 Linux, x86_64 Linux, i386 OS X, Windows

 So that's 9 new packages to upload.

 If you assume each of these is somewhere between 9-15mb, and takes between
 20 extra minutes to setup correctly, test, make sure any changes are
 committed, etc, and 7 minutes to upload, that adds 270 minutes to what I'm
 currently doing. A lot of that is upload time and can be safely non-
 interactive. All the same, I don't think this is a high (or even medium)
 priority right now, though perhaps in the future it is a good idea.

 >  * We should build a separate Firefox-only tarball already anyway, so
 that we can just dump the Firefox binary into our TBB builds whenever we
 build a new TBB because Tor changed, rather than wasting time waiting for
 an unnecessary Firefox rebuild.

 I don't understand this. We have to rebuild Firefox for many platforms
 whenever there is a new Firefox release, but that is the only time it's
 rebuilt. In which situation is an unnecessary Firefox rebuild happening?

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2848#comment:4>
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