[tor-dev] Porting Tor Browser to the BSDs

[Dave Huseby]

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On 03/03/2015 12:34 PM, Georg Koppen wrote:
> Dave Huseby:
>> I'm a Bitrig [0] user and have been slowly patching up
>> gitian-builder so that it knows how to create build VM's other
>> than ubuntu [1].  I haven't pushed all of my patches yet, but I
>> have a version of gitian-builder where make-base-vm understands
>> "--os bitrig --iso cd10.iso" and it auto-installs Bitrig into a
>> VM.  My goal is to build Bitrig deterministically using gitian
>> and I'm getting pretty close to at least doing builds.  I'm not
>> sure about the other roadblocks yet (e.g. timestamps, etc).
> 
> thanks for working on this. It is an interesting idea to enhance
> Gitian in this way and it might help us to look at the differences
> that building with a Debian build VM would bring us (and to
> eliminate them). (although for this use case it might be easier to
> just patch python-vm-builder accordingly). I'd be interested in
> hearing about the progress you are making and the issues you are
> running into.

In theory, modifying python-vm-builder to "install" *BSD without
actually booting the install media is possible.  The *BSD installer
just sets up device files and site-local configurations (e.g.
hostname, timezone, password, etc) and then unpacks a bunch of
tarballs.  It should be possible to make that happen.  It may actually
be easier than what I'm doing now.  The main roadblock I think will be
setting up the BSD disklabel and formatting on the disk.  Linux
doesn't have UFS read/write by default.

>> I think my effort to add gitian support other OS's for build
>> VM's would enable building the TBB using the target OS rather
>> than cross-compiling from ubuntu.  The only downside I can see is
>> the increase in work trying to keep TBB building on all of these
>> other platforms.
> 
> Yes + it makes Gitian more complex due to necessary patches for
> each OS you start to support. Setting the different environments up
> should be a one-time task and new descriptors need to be written
> anyway. Thus, that should not matter so much then.

I'm doing it this way because I'm not sure it is possible to
cross-compile Bitrig--or any other BSD--from Linux.

- --dave
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