Re: Tor Browser

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

ng0@we.make.ritual.n0.is skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès writes:

[...]

>> I suppose TB contains a script that does all that, right?  Would it work
>> to simply run it?  If it invokes wget/curl, then this needs to be
>> replaced, but the rest should be fine.
>
> It's not that easy I'm afraid.
> Currently they use a gitian build, as described in this README[0],
> which the person maintaining the torbrowser ebuild for Gentoo out
> of portage replicates and follows in parts.
> It can't be followed completely, as `builders/tor-browser-bundle'
> requires a checkout of gitian of the torproject.org
>
> So we have to look at what they do and recreate this build
> procedure, there's no individual Makefile, the releases are
> created in VMs.
>
> Dependencies are kept up to date here[1].
>
> This[2] is the script connecting/using gitian for gnu-linux releases.
>
> The Makefile just runs the corresponding scripts.

Gitian is about building binaries.  There must be some script somewhere
to apply the relevant patches to the source first, before one builds it,
no?

>> It’s unfortunate that there’s no ready-to-build TB tarball, that would
>> simplify things for us.
>
> Yes.. But I think icecat suffers from the same problem, only that
> icecat tarballs/binaries are built using a bash script applying
> all that's needed to the firefox sources again.

IceCat publishes source tarballs that, AIUI, are produced essentially by
running a script that patches Firefox’s code base (same approach for
Linux-libre.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.