[tor-dev] The Torouter and the DreamPlug

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 02:01:14AM +0200, intrigeri wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If the configuration bits that are relevant to Torouter were managed
> using debconf (and possibly ucf), not only the webui's job would be a
> bit easier to do, but other Debian derivatives (such as the FreedomBox
> and Tails) could ship their customizations to the default
> configuration as a preseeding file rather than as a full-blown torrc
> forked from the default one.
> 
> Using Config::Model (Debian package: libconfig-model-perl) would
> probably be even better on the long run, but the initial investment of
> writing a model might be too much for the Torouter project.

Actually I've done some work on this area, but the feedback from my mail
on (at that time) ot-talk [1] being not so positive, I've stalled a bit on
this task.

It's a big one as there isn't a policy on the configuration file format
that guides it and assure some consistency for the torrc file you can rely
on to write the rules. Plus, comments are not very well handled by
config-model, which I'm not sure will help in having debconf reacting
smoothly if the comments were stripped off the torrc file by config-model.
This is an area were I needed some more researches, but if one of you have
some hints on this, I'd be glad to hear. :)

The last thread and ticket about the excito plug did raise again this
topic in my mind though, but haven't found some spare time to go on with
it.

bert.

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/thread.html#19761