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

[Matt Traudt]

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 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
> 8. 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.

-- 
Matt