Hi,
sajolida wrote (19 Feb 2015 14:23:03 GMT) :
> intrigeri:
>> sajolida wrote (18 Feb 2015 11:32:17 GMT) :
>>> intrigeri:
>>>> Alan wrote (12 Feb 2015 15:32:15 GMT) :
>>>>>>> - Ability to close a circuit manually.
[...]
> Fine with me. Still, we would need to have arm documented in the first
> place. And since I propose it to go in "Advanced topics" anyway we can
> explain the workaround there for now and create the upstream ticket that
> you mentioned as well.
Cool. So I've created #8927, marked #8915 as blocking it, and filed
Tor#14979 upstream.
> Same for me, I'm pretty sure that Vidalia stays green forever once Tor
> is started.
OK.
> And I'm fine with mimicking this behavior for a start if
> that's easier to implement (no regression), but I think this is buggy
> (the onion shouldn't be green if Tor is not in a working state anymore).
> I want to replace Vidalia to get rid of its bugs not to reimplement them :)
I definitely agree with that.
>>> but would it be conceivable to have Tor Monitor
>>> appear as green onion on the desktop as Vidalia does until now?
>>
>> If we really have had the feature you're asking for (conveying the
>> status of the tor processs connection to the Tor network) since years,
>> then sure, it definitely makes sense to me to keep it.
>>
>> If, however, we never had this feature, then IMO it can't suddenly
>> become important and a blocking missing feature in Tor Monitor.
> I don't think it's blocking either. I'm just trying to think in advance
> about what Tor Monitor should be in its version 1.0, just to make sure
> that we are taking the right architectural decisions from the beginning.
Great, I think we're reached a consensus here :)
Alan, I think we should capture this on Redmine. Do you want to take
care of it, or should I?
> Yes, and if I understood correctly Tor Monitor currently needs Tails
> Jessie. So an obvious roadmap would be to have a working replacement of
> Vidalia with Tor Monitor (without regressions) in Tails Jessie. Does
> that sound realistic? Then only we can work on making it better (eg.
> smarter onion status icon, progress bar while starting Tor, etc.).
Works for me. Let's create a bunch of tickets then!
> Let's try to make it generic straight away! I'd love to have it on my
> regular Debian as well.
Same here :)
>> I thought about it
>> a bit harder, and now it's not obvious to me what we would gain by
>> merging the two tools we need into a single one:
>>
>> * Tails could start the Tor bootstrap and time sync progress monitor.
>> Upon completion, this piece of software would either just
>> terminate, or (if we need a permanent indicator that's tight to the
>> actual Tor status) start Tor Monitor --hide-in-taskbar, that would
>> display some onion.
>>
>> * Anyone else would just use Tor Monitor.
>>
>> And then this topic becomes mostly orthogonal to the current
>> discussion, I think :)
> That would work. It would cut the visible part of things into two: Tor
> Monitor (with status icon) and progress bar (while starting Tor).
> But couldn't the Tor progress bar be generic as well? I'm not sure but
> it could make sense on my regular Debian when starting or restart Tor as
> well. Then even the progress bar is in Debian and not Tails specific.
That would be ideal, but the way we bootstrap Tor connectivity in
Tails is strongly coupled with our time sync' thing, which isn't
exactly generic, e.g. we sometimes restart Tor in the middle of this
process (we do that after changing the system time, and also when we
failed to get a consensus on first attempt). It might be that some day
little-t-tor gives us everything we need out-of-the-box to change
this, but we're not there yet. In the current state of things, I don't
see how we can implement what you're suggesting, but perhaps anonym,
who knows this area of our codebase quite better than me, will have
better ideas.
>> (Off-topic: one problem we'll have in resolving #7437 is how it plays
>> with Tor Launcher in "bridge mode", that already provides *some*
>> feedback regarding Tor bootstrap.)
> Yeah, I just thought about that while writing that email as well. Maybe
> we could skip the Tor Launcher progress bar once we have our own. But
> then what happen if Tor Launcher fails to start Tor because all the
> bridges are unreachable?
Good point. I don't know what _currently_ happens in this
case, actually.
--
intrigeri
