Matthew Finkel:
On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 09:15:16AM -0500, Mark Smith wrote:
On 12/6/18 3:56 PM, Matthew Finkel wrote:
Hi all,
The next steps for torbutton and tor-launcher will be migrating from the restartless pieces to webextensions. This will be a requirement for the next ESR, and it is already the situation with the current Firefox releases. Also, they must be system add-ons. ...
Does this mean that the idea of building Torbutton and Tor Launcher into Tor Browser will not work? Tell us more about what you learned in Orlando ;)
No, that should remain the goal. These steps are only for a (possible) stepping stone before we reach that stage.
After I sent this mail and I had another discussion about it, I realized I should've mentioned we should evaluate the effort/time required of migrating the current extensions to webextensions compared with directly moving the functionality into firefox patches. It may be the case moving/reimplementing the the logic in Firefox may be the easier path.
We should take a step back and consider this before we dive into this process.
We've been in the process of integrating more and more Torbutton functionality into Tor Browser over the years. My sekrit plan has been that we use the current "opportunity" to get rid of the remaining bits of the Torbutton extension and include them directly in the browser. Not sure how this matches to Igor's idea with Torbutton's redesign but hopefully we find a way to align both.
For Tor Launcher I am less sure but we have some time allocated for Dec/Jan so that we can come up with a proper plan and start working on it.
As for the general timeline, I strongly agree that we should be ready with the transition _before_ we do the esr68 update dance.
Georg