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

[Micah Lee]

On 01/30/2013 12:26 AM, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
>>>> 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.
> 
> How do you handle home directories that are shared between multiple
> systems with different architectures?

Does this ever actually happen?

> How do you handle home directories that are mounted noexec?

This is a good point. Ideas below.

>>>> 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.
> 
> If I understand correctly, old versions are not cleaned up. Not the
> nicest in the long run.

This is simple enough to fix. The update script, or even the launcher
script, can clean up old versions.

> Also, this approach does not help users to keep their bookmarks or
> certficate database from one version to another. It means that a package
> upgrade will result in unexpected loss of bookmarks. Even if it's only
> from sight and the data are still there, I think it would result in a
> pretty bad user experience.

Neither does the current update method for TBB on Linux, which totally
sucks. Being able to at least update with the package manager is a great
improvement.

However, I was thinking about how to deal with this. I think it
shouldn't be too much work to extract the tarball to
/usr/lib/torbrowser, but move the Data directory (which includes the
Firefox profile) to ~/.torbrowser.

I started updating my git repo to deal with this, but ran into some
snags. I'll try more later when I have time.

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

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