[tor-talk] Possibly Smart, Possibly Stupid, Idea Regarding Tor & Linux Distributions

[Sebastian Hahn]

Hi Alec,

thanks for your thoughts. I have just one very quick comment, but
it seems you haven't addressed it yet:

> On 03 Jan 2017, at 03:04, Alec Muffett <alec.muffett at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Where I feel that issues arise are in the older Ubuntus and Debians.
> 
> Again, I understand that there are "backports" repos, but my experience of
> encouraging new people to adopt Tor is one of trying to help them to jump
> over the hurdles which we immediately place in their way.

I install Debian stable on my servers precisely because they don't
necessarily track the latest packages for everything. When I have
installed them and they work, I don't need to do super frequent
maintenance - I get security updates, but not much more. Tor updates for
relays frequently require you to read the changelog carefully to have a
sane upgrade path, other software does that too - having to do that
constantly when you're not actually need any of the new features is
super annoying imo.

There are some select pieces of software where this isn't the case -
the kernel on my gaming system, the tor package on my relays, some
others - where I selectively use backports or custom repositories. I
would imagine if the main purpose of my machines wasn't providing tor
relays, I'd prefer to just run whatever debian stable provides.

> So this is kinda the problem statement:
> 
> - old versions of Tor are out there in the wild
> 
> - they pollute the software environment, representing "cognitive load" /
> barriers to easy adoption and learning
> 
> - adoption and learning are critical to the growth in use of Tor

I guess I just disagree with this problem statement.

Cheers
Sebastian