Re: [Tails-dev] Tor Launcher extension [Was: Mike's March 20…

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Autor: intrigeri
Data:  
Dla: Mike Perry
CC: tails-dev, mcs, brade
Stare tematy: Re: [Tails-dev] Tor Launcher extension [Was: Mike's March 2013]
Temat: Re: [Tails-dev] Tor Launcher extension [Was: Mike's March 2013]
Hi Mike, hi Pearl Crescent team!

Mike Perry wrote (02 Apr 2013 08:52:56 GMT) :
> Thus spake intrigeri (intrigeri@???):
>> 1. Any obvious showstopper, off the top of your head, regarding how
>>    the Tor Launcher could be usable for Tails?


> I think you guys mostly won't use it.


Back in April, I was inclined to agree, and we had someone who
volunteered to take over the maintenance of Vidalia. Since then, that
"someone" disappeared. Vidalia's lack of a maintainer is a more and
more serious issue for us (e.g. the great bridges support plan was
implemented in the 0.4.x alpha branch, and never landed into a stable
release yet). Vidalia being what it is, I doubt we want to maintain
it ourselves.

So, I'm willing to give the "use Tor Launcher in Tails" idea another
chance. Also, it would be really awesome if all major ways of using
Tor (TBB, Tails, etc.) could provide the same interface for
configuring how Tor should access the network. This would make
documentation work (and thus, translation work) easier, and make user
experience way better IMHO.

The thing is, it seems to me that Tails cannot really use Tor Launcher
in its current state, for a few reasons:

  * we want to stop starting a web browser by default;
  * we would rather *not* give the desktop user, that runs the web
    browser, full rights on configuring Tor; we just stopped doing
    this, actually.


With all this in mind, I was almost tempted to just replicate the Tor
Launcher UI in our custom GDM greeter, but it would be quite sad, and
not necessarily easy to integrate nicely in there.

And then, someone suggested turning Tor Launcher into an autonomous
XUL application. I've not thought this through yet, but it does seem
this would be enough to allow us to simply s/Vidalia/Tor Launcher/.
Are there plans to do so? How hard would you expect it to be for
someone skilled in this area? Would you want to do it, for the sake of
the greater Tor community?

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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