Re: Tor Browser

[Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com>]

ng0 <ng0@we.make.ritual.n0.is> writes:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> 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’.
>
> There are the .mar files, which I suppose are the built source of
> torbrowser, but I can't tell for sure since i can't find an upstream for
> mar-tools. I guess it is Mozilla, but where is it available?
>
> https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/6.0.3/

Hi, I am a tor browser and torsocks user (since a few months ago). Last
time I tried building tor browser from source (and failed), gitian will
have to download some non-free xcode stuff to build for the os x
platform. Is it possible to only build for gnu/linux without building
for windows and os x? Will the resulting binary still be byte-to-byte
identical with the tor project official build?

Also, it seems tor browser needs virtualenv and virtualbox to
build. Last time I checked virtualbox, it was on the contrib area of
debian since it requires a non-free[1] compiler to build the bios[2].
I hope we can find way around these issues since tor browser is IMHO an
essential tool nowadays. Finally, I agree that icecat could switch to
tor browser as its upstream.


[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_Open_Watcom_Public_License
[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox