intrigeri:
> Alan wrote (06 Mar 2015 21:04:46 GMT) :
>> intrigeri <intrigeri@???> wrote:
>>> Alan wrote (22 Feb 2015 01:48:28 GMT) :
>
>> Really? I though we wanted bootstrap progress too, that current
>> vidalia's onion provides (no onion/red > yellow > green)
>
> Sadly, this assumption is not correct... which gives us yet another
> demonstration that even *we* don't understand what these colors are
> about (hence my doubts about whether it's really useful, but
> thankfully I've given up on arguing about that already). In current
> Tails:
>
> a) no onion indeed means "Tor hasn't bootstrapped yet", since we start
> Vidalia only when Tor has bootstrapped
> b) yellow onion means that:
> 1. Vidalia is connected to the Tor control port
> 2. while Tor has already successfully bootstrapped (otherwise we
> wouldn't have started Vidalia), Vidalia hasn't downloaded all
> the info it needs to display a complete UI (most notably, the
> detailed info about relays)
> c) green onion means that Vidalia is connected to the Tor control port
> and has all the info it needs to display a complete UI
>
> [No idea if/how it's different when Vidalia is integrated into other
> operating systems, but who cares, we're talking about avoiding
> regressions vs. the current state of Tails here.]
>
> The only information in there that is about Tor's bootstrap progress
> is "display an onion at all, or not", which is 1 bit of information.
> The rest is about Vidalia's own bootstrap progress.
>
> I don't think that the onion Shell extension needs to differentiate
> between cases (b) and (c): IIRC we want it to provide some way to
> start Tor Monitor, and then Tor Monitor can itself convey to the user
> any relevant message regarding its own bootstrap status, that is how
> much it's ready to display complete information. As I understand it,
> we want the onion icon to say something about the state of Tor, not
> about the state of Tor Monitor.
>
> So, we don't need to convey any additional information to the onion
> Shell extension than "we've started you, display that green onion" and
> "stop displaying that green onion" (possibly by disabling the
> extensions altogether).
I agree with intrigeri that the yellow onion is currently broken. We
could fix this to match "yellow" = "Tor is starting" which is, I guess,
the intended meaning of it. At least that's what our doc say :)
https://tails.boum.org/doc/anonymous_internet/vidalia/index.en.html
But since it's broken now, we have no reason to fix it before replacing
Vidalia, and I'd rather work on #7438 (progress indicator) to convey
that meaning. Once we get there I definitely think that we won't need to
duplicate whatever Tor progress indicator with a yellow onion. Unless
the progress indicator itself is a yellow onion, ha ha! This I can't
tell you as we haven't design this at all yet...
Still, the fact that this green onion will probably end up being part of
a bigger picture (Tor indicator) might be useful to keep in mind while
designing its technical infrastructure.
Regarding whether the onion turns red when Tor is not usable anymore
(for whatever reason that we still need to specify). This I can't tell
either.
If you think that you need more UX design to be done before deciding on
the right infrastructure for those tools, then we should start a thread
on tails-ux. The bad thing to do would be to take technical decisions in
this thread (which is dense and probably not read by anyone else than
us) that would, later on, limit what we ca propose as UX for the big
picture of #7438 and frustrate both the people designing and the people
coding.
--
sajolida
