Special One-Time SRU Handling request for torbrowser-launcher

[Thomas Ward]

Hello, release team.

Pursuant to a recent change for torbrowser-launcher and Tor Browser, we have a little bit of a conundrum that is leading to a one time request for SRUing the latest `torbrowser-launcher` to all currently supported releases.

With Tor Browser 12 (TB12 for short here), upstream tor browser no longer uses locales, requiring folder cleanup from TB12 and download URL changes in order for things to properly function.  Unfortunately, the code changes necessary to implement the changes to torbrowser-launcher are not easily nitpicked and include more than just these fixes, as it has new changes and such to make it work properly.  Refer to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/torbrowser-launcher/+bug/2000077 as the current bug on this.

Debian is behind on updating upstream, so later today I will be preparing a package for Lunar that will have a -0ubuntu1 prefix for the latest upstream version.  That works fine in Lunar.  It also works fine in Kinetic and in initial tests in Jammy.  I'm installing test environments for Focal and Bionic.

The problem here is, though, we have a mix of "new features" and "bug fixes" together - there is no  'major version bump' for feature branches vs. 'bugfix' branches, making it a comingled problem of "new features" and "bug fixes".  Therefore, I'd like to request a one-time exception for SRU processes to accept the same version packaged for each release using Lunar as a base, and adjusting the packaging as needed accordingly for older releases.  That is, this will be an SRU, but it will accept the 'new features' that're part of torbrowser-launcher that were not present in Bionic or Focal but are present in later releases.

Most of the 'feature' changes allow choosing additional options, etc. but nothing that as far as I can tell changes the core functionality of the package.

I'm happy to discuss this further with the SRU and Release teams (IRC is always a way to reach me heh), but given the complexities of including the fixes and changes just to make tor browser 12 work with the older launchers, it'd make more sense and ease of fixing this "breaks the launcher tool entirely" issue by simply taking the current version and making it match in the entire packaging structure.

I'm happy to spearhead this, but I wanted to put this to the Release Team and the SRU team for consideration before I go through the process of building all this for the SRU/MRE/Version Bump processes as well.

A full changelog upstream is available on their GitHub - https://github.com/micahflee/torbrowser-launcher



Thomas
LP: https://launchpad.net/~teward
Ubuntu Core Developer
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