Re: [Tails-dev] keeping up with transports

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] keeping up with transports
intrigeri:
> sajolida wrote (22 Nov 2014 11:55:50 GMT) :
>> I started a ticket for that:
>> https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8287
>
> Thanks!
>
>> So what is required for the inclusion of a new pluggable transports?
>
>> * Having it in Debian
>
> ... stable or ${stable_codename}-backports.
>
>> Anything else?
>
> * Being supported by BridgeDB
> * Being supported by Tor Launcher
> * Being supported by enough bridges
> * Adding some value to the already supported PTs
> * Being supported by the Tor AppArmor profile we ship
> * More?


Thanks for being so exhaustive. Now I am wondering where is the
appropriate place to store all that information.

In an intent to make all this digestible for the user documentation
maybe we can try to summarize that. (I'm trying to find a way to have
this fit in the main doc here not in the FAQ.)

First, I think that some transports like meek don't fit with the idea
behind BridgeDB. If I understand correctly, you only need to choose
"meek over Google" or "meek over Amazon" but don't need a confidential
information to be fetched from BridgeDB.

Furthermore, the relevant transports supported by Tor Browser currently
are also supported by BridgeDB. See [1]. We could check with them
whether this is a requirement, but it is probably an ok simplification
to tell our users "being supported by Tor Browser".

[1]:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports#ListofPluggableTransports

Regarding "Being supported by the Tor AppArmor profile we ship", is this
work specific to Tails or does it need to be upstream somewhere?
Otherwise I would skip mentioning this at least in the user doc: of
course we need to do *some* word inside Tails to have the PT working,
that includes AppArmor, ideally test suite, documentation, etc.

Regarding "Being supported by enough bridges" and "Adding some value to
the already supported PTs", once in Debian and in Tor Launcher, which
should kind of proves the relevance and widen the deployment of the
transport, do we see ourselves in a position of saying "no, this bridge
is not deployed enough or not useful enough for us to include it"?

Otherwise, in the user doc we could summarize all this by saying
something like "needs to be in Debian stable or backports (both the
client and server side) and supported in Tor Browser". I'm supposing
here that if it's in Tor Browser it's in Tor Launcher and avoid a new word

Still, your detailed checklist could be useful to keep. Would it makes
sense somewhere in the design doc?

--
sajolida