Tor Packages

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:18:12AM -0400, 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.
> 
> 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?

We are of course willing to find a solution when an upstream project is not
happy with the way their software is presented in Ubuntu.  Removing the
package would of course be straightforward, though I don't think we have a
straightforward process for excluding packages from the release while
keeping them in development.

Surely it would be better to keep the package up-to-date in stable releases
instead.  We have some standing exceptions to the update policy which allow
this.

-- 
 - mdz