Hi, Being relying myself on Firefox profiles / virtual machines rather than the toggle thing, I'd personally be happy to see it go away.
Let me put my Tails developer hat on. Done. Let's go. Mike Perry wrote (11 Apr 2011 23:33:08 GMT) : > The reason I am discussing this in so much detail here is because I > believe there is a chance that there are users out there who rely on > the toggle model and/or their OS Firefox build, and may be confused > or enraged by the new model. I'm asking this list to get an idea of > how many of those users there are, and to try to understand what the > overall costs of this sort of migration are. [...] > So can anyone bring up any specific issues that may be caused by the > change? Context: Tails currently ships Debian's Iceweasel (Firefox renamed for trademark reasons) and Torbutton. We don't care for the toggle feature that is unsupported in Tails and generally confusing for Tails users. Debian has put great efforts [0] to avoid shipping embedded code copies, and I quite like it from a sysadmin point-of-view, but this is mostly irrelevant to the current discussion *in the context of Tails*, so I'll try to put aside my usual rants: if there's a serious security bug in, say, the FreeType library, we need to release updated Tails images regardless of the actual technical reason (in case we go on shipping Debian's Iceweasel with no embedded code copies + Torbutton, we want to get the updated FreeType Debian package; in case we ship the TBB, we want to get the new binary statically linked against its own FreeType copy... I guess). [0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=392362 This being said... I fear needing to move away from a now-unsupported Torbutton extension makes our life hard as Tails developers. Two main issues arise from the top of my head, which I'm going to describe. Since the end of Torbutton seems inevitable, I do hope my concerns can easily be dismissed and the new TBB can be a viable solution for our usecase. ,---- | Tails-specific Firefox profile configuration `---- For various reasons, the Tails Firefox configuration is likely to keep being a bit different from the TBB's one. If we are forced to use the TBB instead of our current Debian's Iceweasel+Torbutton, I wonder how/if we will we be able to maintain this delta. I guess anyone needs to know a bit how we currently do this, so as to be able to answer this question of mine. Let me explain a bit. We Tails developers have invested quite a lot of work to avoid maintaining in VCS / shipping files into $HOME that are of the binary kind (be them really binary, or enough of a mess to make the diff corresponding to a given change hard to understand). Since the good old amnesia 0.5 days, we've been building such files programmatically from plaintext, understandable source files at image build time. Just like GConf settings, the Tails Firefox profile directory falls into this category: it's pretty hard to track such a directory in VCS, change options in there while maintaining consistency, know what files shall be shipped, which ones are auto-generated at runtime and so on, among the huge pile of files one can find in a profile directory. To achieve this we use: * a system-wide profile skeleton [1] that mostly contains the preferences *.js files and two extensions that have not made their way into Debian yet * SQLite preferences files are generated at build time [2] from plaintext SQL sources [3] [1] http://git.immerda.ch/?p=amnesia.git;a=tree;f=config/chroot_local-includes/etc/iceweasel;hb=refs/heads/stable [2] http://git.immerda.ch/?p=amnesia.git;a=blob;f=config/chroot_local-hooks/13-iceweasel_sqlite;hb=refs/heads/stable [3] http://git.immerda.ch/?p=amnesia.git;a=tree;f=config/chroot_local-includes/usr/share/amnesia/iceweasel/sql;hb=refs/heads/stable If we migrate to shipping TBB, can we go on maintaining our Tails specific Firefox configuration delta as described above? Will the TBB's Firefox use the standard ways to fetch system-wide configuration? (I guess this should be a opt-in option, probably not toggle-able from the GUI, as the TBB usually wants to be as much independent from the host OS as possible.) ,---- | Compatibility with FF extensions installed from Debian packages `---- For maintainability reasons, we Tails developers tend to prefer automatic build/upgrade procedures over manually setting up things. We also tend to prefer benefiting from already existing infrastructure and processes that work well, and especially Debian's ones, over setting up our own ones. For such reasons, I feel it's both cleaner and much less time-consuming for us to install and ship Firefox extensions from the Debian archive than manually downloading those, checking file integrity and unzipping XPI files into the profile skeleton directory. Maintaining compatibility between various FF versions and various extensions is also work I would not want to do... especially since it's already being done by the Debian maintainers for the extensions we ship. I'd hate having to replicate their work. Is it imaginable to see the new TBB make use of extensions that are installed system-wide? (probably opt-in as well) > We are collecting these issues as child tickets of this bug: > https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2880 I'll summarize the discussion results there. In the meantime, I prefer using email if you don't mind. Bye, -- intrigeri <[email protected]> | GnuPG key @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/intrigeri.asc | OTR fingerprint @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/otr.asc | We're dreaming of something else. | Something more clandestine, something happier. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
