Re: [Tails-dev] What do we miss to replace Vidalia [was: Get…

Alan:
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2015 14:23:03 +0000
> sajolida <sajolida@???> wrote:
>> 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.
>>>>>>>
> [...]
>>> => seems like we can address this corner case in a good-enough way
>>> without compromising security nor spending large amounts of energy on
>>> this topic.
>>
>> 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.
>
> +1
>
> [About the green onion]

There's no "green onion" in the quoted emails above that. So I
understand that you're agreeing on having a green onion displayed
somewhere on the desktop once Tor is started. If not please clarify.

>> 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 :)
>>
>>>> but would it be conceivable to have Tor Monitor
>>>> appear as green onion on the desktop as Vidalia does until now?
>
> I don't think it's the way to go:
>
> - I'd like Tor Monitor to stay a generic application, with a clear
> focus on being a monitor for Tor and showing whatever icon on the
> desktop doesn't look like the same task for me.

I beg to disagree. To me "monitoring Tor" also means "being able to have
some clue at any time about whether it's been started or not", from the
desktop. So the green onion is part of "monitoring Tor" for me, it's
status icon. At least as far as we agree on keeping that green onion
(see the beginning of that mail).

> - System Tray Icons were deprecated in Gtk since 3.14. A proper
> implementation of this "green onion" for GNOME 3 desktop would be a
> (very simple) Shell extension, to which "we" (the NetworkManager
> hook) should send a DBus signal (or the opposite). That might be a
> tiny funny project.

If we agree on keeping the green onion then I don't care whether we have
one, two, or n pieces of software. I tend to believe that having one is
simpler than having two (when possible) but I don't know GNOME internals
as much as you do.

If the green onion needs to be a shell extension, then maybe Tor Monitor
should be part of that same shell extension.

This shell extension would appear as an icon on the desktop and have an
option to open a window with the details of the circuits. Like our
OpenPGP Applet does: you click on it, choose "Encrypt Clipboard with
Public Keys", and it opens a window with a list of keys.

>> 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.).
>>
>>>> And if Tor Monitor is always running in the background, then maybe it
>>>> could also provide information while Tor is starting and be the right
>>>> tool to solve #7437 in the future?
>>>
>>> That's what I had hidden in the back of my head when asking this
>>> question initially :)
>
> I'm not opposed to exposing a DBus interface in a future version of
> TorMonitor to provide the "green onion" or other applications more
> information that our hooks could. But I'm not sure it is the right
> place to do it yet.