[tor-dev] We need a new RPM maintainer

[Henry de Valence]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 10:19:15AM -0400, Nick Mathewson wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 10:06 AM, nusenu <nusenu at openmailbox.org> wrote:
> > What is the Tor Project's motivation for providing RPMs (instead of
> > relying on the RPM distro maintainer)?
> 
> Frankly, I don't know. I don't actually install Tor from packages
> myself, since I'm nearly always running Tor from master.
> 
> People who download our RPMs: in what way are they beneficial?

The last time I had occasion to check (around 6 months ago), the official Tor
Project RPMs were actually worse than the Fedora ones: worse integration with
Fedora's systemd configuration, no SELinux, and they didn't uninstall cleanly,
meaning you had to manually clean up permissions issues in order to switch back
to the Fedora packages.

Given that maintaining packages is an ongoing effort that requires keeping
track of how the distribution is configuring their system, wouldn't it be
better to find a way to work with the existing distro maintainers so that, for
instance, the current Fedora RPMs could be the officially-endorsed Tor Project
RPMs?

Cheers,
Henry de Valence