[tor-talk] Tor Browser Bundle .deb packaging solution

[Micah Lee]

I posted about this the other day but I think most people missed it.
I've come up with a working solution to packaging TBB in a Debian repo,
so that people can apt-get install it and easily get regular updates.

Here's the bug: Make a deb of the Torbrowser and add to repository
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5236

Here's the packaging script I wrote:
https://github.com/micahflee/torbrowser

You can git clone it and run "equivs-build torbrowser" to build a .deb
to install.

The deb package contains the latest TBB tarball and a launcher script.
It also contains a "Tor Browser" application launcher that runs this
script, so users can open Tor Browser from their desktop environment's menu.

When a user runs the launcher script, it checks if
~/.torbrowser/$VERSION exists. If it doesn't, it extracts the TBB
tarball to there. Then it runs ~/.torbrowser/$VERSION/start-tor-browser.

Releasing updated versions is simple. The update would include a new TBB
tarball and the launcher script would include a new version, so the next
time a user runs Tor Browser it will extract the new version in their
~/.torbrowser dir.

Thoughts on this approach? I'd love to see it happen.

There's another related bug: Get TorBrowser in Debian
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3994

However I don't think this could end up in Debian without some changes,
since "The Debian policy states that a package should not contain any
embedded code copy. So simply shipping the result of TorBrowserBundle
build is not an option."

-- 
Micah Lee
https://twitter.com/micahflee

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