[tor-qa] Vidalia standalone bundles for testing (TBB 3.x "mod")

[Mark Smith]

On 12/18/13 6:21 PM, Erinn Clark wrote:
> * Mark Smith <mcs at pearlcrescent.com> [2013:12:18 15:14 -0500]:
> I am intrigued by this!
>
> Here is my potentially incorrect understanding: normally Vidalia expects to
> find a vidalia.conf in ~/Library/Vidalia, and in the old OSX TBB we were
> resetting cwd to $HOME so that it would look there. If it doesn't find one
> there it writes one itself, sometimes based on information it gathers elsewhere
> (e.g., it looks for tor and a torrc in some places). Without vidalia.conf I
> don't think it knows to look for 9151 and I'm not sure what the option is to
> specify a different conf file (or "hardcode" that port), though I'm going to
> look into it.
>
> Replicating your steps above, after making sure I have no ~/.tor,
> ~/Library/Vidalia, or /Applications/Vidalia.app, it just launches Vidalia and
> says it can't find tor. (OSX 10.6.8)

I missed the fact that old configuration was present under 
~/Library/Vidalia/  Sorry about that. After removing ~/Library/Vidalia, 
I see the same problem you see.

Things seems to work if I create a directory structure like this:
   Vidalia/Vidalia.app
   Vidalia/Data/vidalia.conf
and use the following as the initial contents of vidalia.conf:

[General]
LanguageCode=en

[Tor]
ControlPort=9151
AuthenticationMethod=cookie

and then start vidalia from a shell so I can pass -datadir like this:
   cd Vidalia
   ./Vidalia.app/Contents/MacOS/Vidalia -datadir ./Data

Are you trying to avoid patching Vidalia or could we modify it to look 
next to itself for its data directory (e.g., use ./Data instead of 
~/Library/Vidalia by default)?  If that was done, we could just ship 
Vidalia.app and Data/vidalia.conf.

See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8811 for an older 
patch (which would need to be modified, but which shows the code we 
would need to change).

-- 
Mark Smith
Pearl Crescent, LLC
http://pearlcrescent.com/