[tor-dev] Towards a new version of the PT spec...

[Yawning Angel]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 17:39:58 +1000
Tim Wilson-Brown - teor <teor2345 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> > On 8 Sep 2015, at 08:45, Yawning Angel <yawning at schwanenlied.me>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > So, we currently have a Pluggable Transport (PT) spec, and it
> > kind-of sort-of works (The documentation is a mess that I'm working
> > on cleaning up, but it's an orthogonal issue for how well it works).
> > 
> > There are a number of problems with the current PT spec that require
> > breaking backward compatibility to fix, so eventually I would like
> > to do so.
> > 
> > I'm soliciting input on what people would also like to see in a
> > (currently hypothetical) PT spec 2.0 beyond what I already have in
> > mind:
> > 
> > ...
> > 
> > UNLIKELY:
> >  * Specify an interface for where fork()/exec() isn't possible
> > (iOS). I don't think this is makes sense because it is probably too
> >    platform/caller specific.
> 
> I imagine that this would require a PT-as-thread(s) interface, which
> is out of scope, as iOS is a single platform. It seems to me that
> using a PT on iOS could be done in a similar way to using tor. (That
> is, if you can’t fork tor from an iOS app, then forking PTs is the
> least of your worries.)

I was thinking PTs as a shared object of some sort with presumably but
not necessarily lots of threads under the hood.  But I marked this as
UNLIKELY precisely because it's a lot of effort for a single platform
(however important) that isn't targeted by an official Tor anything at
this point.

It also is a platform I don't have access to, and never will, so unless
someone is willing to chime in on how to properly support this sort of
thing in a way that doesn't clutter up the PT spec and implementations
with a lot of extra stuff it won't happen.

> I’m hoping someone has developed a generic way of doing this, at
> least for network apps. What are the ChatSecure people doing for
> their XMMP + Tor chat accounts? Launching pthreads?

Don't know, don't care at this moment since it's totally orthogonal to
drafting a new Pluggable Transports spec (That doesn't mean that it
isn't important, just trying to keep discussion on track.).

Regards,

-- 
Yawning Angel
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