[tor-bugs] #5236 [Tor bundles/installation]: Make a deb of the Torbrowser and add to repository

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Fri Feb 8 01:01:42 UTC 2013


#5236: Make a deb of the Torbrowser and add to repository
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 Reporter:  cypherpunks               |          Owner:                   
     Type:  enhancement               |         Status:  needs_information
 Priority:  normal                    |      Milestone:                   
Component:  Tor bundles/installation  |        Version:                   
 Keywords:                            |         Parent:                   
   Points:                            |   Actualpoints:                   
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Comment(by micahlee):

 You still need to either bundle a TBB tarball with the package, or have
 the launcher script download one. And the big issues I see with bundling a
 TBB tarball in a .deb are:

 1) It is pretty hacky.

 2) It won't get approved by Debian, because "The Debian policy states that
 a package should not contain any embedded code copy. So simply shipping
 the result of TorBrowserBundle build is not an option."

 3) There are different TBB tarballs for each architecture and language.
 Since TBB for GNU/Linux supports 2 architectures and 14 languages, if we
 wanted a single package that shipped all the tarballs (which obviously
 would be insane), it would need 28 tarballs, and take up about 868mb.

 As long as we're basing this off of already published TBB tarballs, I
 think we'd have to build a download system.

 However this could be significantly less hacky, avoid the not getting in
 Debian problem, choose languages dynamically, etc., if we could build it
 off of a TBB source distribution instead.

 It still wouldn't work to get in Debian unless we deal with iceweasel
 /iceweasel-src issues, but it might be a good solution for ending up in
 deb.torproject.org. The related bug, #3994, might have more reasons making
 this hard to end up in Debian. But I don't think having it in Debian is
 the very most important.

 However, going forward with the Tor Browser Launcher program to help you
 download and update TBB avoids all of these problems, I believe could make
 it into Debian, and seems a lot simpler, and also doesn't require getting
 any changes in upstream.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5236#comment:28>
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