libevent & tor

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 03:26:44PM -0800, Ned Bun wrote:
> When I compile new versions of stable or alpha Tor, should I ensure I
> have the latest version of libevent, or use the current, always
> outdated, version of libevent from my Linux distro's repo? Are there
> any disadvantages to not using the latest libevent from the official
> libevent homepage?

It depends just how outdated your libevent is.

And what platform you're running it on, which dictates what
system call it prefers to use: select, poll, kqueue, etc.

Tor tries to warn you if it sees a combination of a platform and
libevent version that it knows is especially bad:
see check_libevent_version() in src/or/config.c

But if you're encountering problems and you're using an old libevent,
upgrading your libevent is often a good place to start.

--Roger