Special One-Time SRU Handling request for torbrowser-launcher

[Thomas Ward]

I'm following up on this today, because Debian finally got off their 
lazy butt and uploaded 0.3.6-2 to Debian that addresses the core 
problems in Debian.

However, that does not solve the problems for everything in Ubuntu.  
With the blessing of the Release team, I did a sync last night (forced) 
of 0.3.6-2 from Debian Unstable to Ubuntu Lunar, which addresses 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/torbrowser-launcher/+bug/2000077 
in Lunar.

Unfortunately the fix that is applied for this in 0.3.6-2 is interwoven 
with all the changes from 0.3.3 to 0.3.6 upstream which includes new 
features.

I have not heard back from the Release team on this, or the SRU team, so 
I'm re-asking this.  Is the SRU / Release team willing to let us do a 
one-time backport from Lunar of 0.3.6-2 to the older releases currently 
supported (to Bionic but no further backwards)?


Thomas


On 2/1/23 14:26, Thomas Ward wrote:
>
> 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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