Tor Packages

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday 27 September 2007 11:18, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> I've been asked by Tor developers if it would be possible to remove the
> tor package (which is in universe) from future Ubuntu releases. The
> software can (and should?) stay in the repository and in development
> versions but should be released.
>
> Tor is anonymity software and routinely fixes bugs and implements new
> features that work around problems that compromise users' anonymity.
> The software's developers believe that is better to have no package at
> all in a release than to have packages that are up to 18 months old and
> which will, in all likelihood, provide users with a false sense of
> anonymity.

The SRU process for Universe is very easy.  If there are patches that need to 
be gotten out for older versions they can be quickly and automatically 
distributed if the packages are in the distribution.  The problem isn't that 
the packages are in Ubuntu, but that they aren' t maintained.  If the Tor 
devs are willing to work with us and provide patches, it isn't very hard to 
get them automatically delivered to all users.

> For Tor users on Ubuntu up-to-date versions for currently maintained
> Ubuntu releases can be found here:
>
>   http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorOnDebian
>
> Does this sound reasonable to folks?

This would require users to regularly manually download and install software 
from outside Ubuntu.  I do not think this is a good direction to head.  Where 
does this stop.  Gnupg is used by users to protect privacy.  Should that be 
removed too?

For all the reasons that a Linux distribution exists, I think that this is not 
a good step.  If Tor will work with us, we can, together, do better than 
either could separately.

Scott K