Thoughts on future upnp/nat-pmp support in Tor

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 05:01:19PM +0100, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
> Roger thinks that it's probably best to fork a (UPnP/NAT-PMP) project,
> include it the Tor source and include it in the main Tor binary. If a
> user has the local library (and it's newer than the included code),
> we'll use their local library. This is similar to what Vidalia is doing
> for UPnP support. However, Vidalia is lacking NAT-PMP support and of
> course Vidalia is obviously external to the Tor binary itself. I think
> adding UPnP/NAT-PMP to Tor may be the best way forward with some caveats.

Actually, Roger thinks we'll be sad long-term if we ship with a copy of
the library but elect to use the local one "sometimes". We should either
link in the local library package, and package the software for all our
target platforms, or include a copy of the source ourselves and always
use that. Not both.

A combination will mean all the sadness of maintaining our own version
*plus* all the sadness of whatever versions are on our target platforms
already.

--Roger