New Tor distribution for testing: Tor Browser Bundle

[Steven J. Murdoch]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 02:36:10AM -0500, Silivrenion wrote:
> I did notice torbrowser was in the directory format that is friendly with
> PortableApps format applications, so props on that.
> 
> Interesting take, taking what Portable Tor <http://portabletor.sf.net> has
> done and bringing it to an all inclusive bundle.

Yes, I did look at how Portable Tor worked when I started, and it was
very helpful to see that it could be done, though I've taken a bit of
a different approach, based on my guess at user requirements. 

The main architectural change, is that Vidalia controls most of the
process. The major advantage is that Vidalia receives and understands
status messages from Tor and can act accordingly. It's also easy to
extend without needed extra build components.

I added new configuration options to handle starting Polipo and Firefox:
 - BrowserExecutable: location of the web browser to be started when
    Tor successfully builds a circuit. When the browser exits, Vidalia
    will shut down too
 - ProxyExecutable: location of the proxy server, started when Vidalia
    does and will be killed as Vidalia exits.

These changes are now in the mainline Vidalia source tree, so might be
useful for other bundles of Tor too. The Tor Browser Bundle is still
in development so assuming we stick to this architecture there might
be some more.

Steven.

-- 
w: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/