[tor-relays] Operator straw poll: Reasons why you use Tor LTS versions?

[Mike Perry]

teor:
>> On 5 Sep 2019, at 12:11, Mike Perry <mikeperry at 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:
>>
>> 1. "I didn't know that Debian's backports repo has latest-stable Tor!"
>> 2. "I didn't see the Tor Project repos mentioned in Tor's Relay docs!"
>> 3. "I'm running a distribution that Tor Project doesn't have repos for."
>> 4. "I rolled my own custom Tor from git and forgot about it."
>> 5. "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?
> 
> 6. When I tried to update, it didn't work with my old config> 7. I need features that only exist in older Tors
>       - I can think of Tor2web, there may be others

Are these common? I feel like this is long-tail. I'm looking for most
common reasons first. After we address the most common reasons, we can
pick our favorite long-tail use cases and decide if those are worth
forward-porting or back-porting individual features for. But not before
the common cases are dealt with. That way lies madness, and no progress,
ever.

> 8. I am maintaining research or other patches against tor, and rebases
>    are difficult

Again, common? I'm going to guess not common (or self-supporting), but
this does feel like something we could measure by checking for git
versions that don't make sense to us in the full descriptor archives.

>> 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?
> 
> The answers are probably something like:
> 6. Provide better relay operator support, and direct me to those support
>    channels in the log messages, when my relay fails to launch

+1 100%. I think this will go light years towards getting rid of non-LTS
Tors and LTS tor's alike, regardless of reason. Then we can ask the
remainder.

> 7. Support old features for longer> 8. Stop refactoring so much code

Nah. I'm not interested in these, even if populism demands them. Some
shit needs to go away because it is not safe to keep around, and some
stuff needs to be better organized to make it easier to improve.


-- 
Mike Perry

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