[tor-talk] TorBirdy patches for Mozilla Thunderbird

[adrelanos]

intrigeri:
> which easily explains why nobody
> ever asked the Iceweasel maintainers to apply them.

I understand, that the Iceweasel maintainers are not interested to add them.

[1]: "On the Debian side, Mike Hommey said he did not want to be
accountable for issues related to the TorBrowser patches and so he does
not want to include them in the main 'iceweasel' package."

If thats the case, I could understand quite well, why they are not
interested. If they are only interested in Iceweasel and not interested
in Tor Browser, why bother with lots of patches, required for a
derivative project, which possibly break later.

> Finding someone with the right set of skills and enough free time to
> actually do this work would be a great way to help. Interested?

I'd be interested, but that task appears too difficult and obscure to me.

Its not like not having time or being lazy. After all, I wrote a
torbrowser updater in bash [2] and Micah Lee wrote one in python. [3]
And Tails developers, as you know :), implemented their own solution for
getting Tor Browser patches in Tails. So much overhead.

> So, in the current
> state of things, this policy of Debian's is simply not applicable, and
> irrelevant as far as the Torbrowser is concerned.

I have a quite different viewpoint here. There are people willing to
contribute, but no one able to do it as policy dictates. Policy is
blindly enforced while saying "for security reasons". While in reality,
with a torbrowser-downloader like solution [3], security is actually
worse. Extraordinary problems require extraordinary solutions.
Flexibility is the bottleneck here.

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3994#comment:17
[2]
https://github.com/Whonix/Whonix/blob/master/whonix_workstation/usr/bin/torbrowser
[3] https://github.com/micahflee/torbrowser-launcher