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Hi teor!
Could you please look at existing .d folders of any other projects tell me what you think? Perhaps discuss this with Tor Project. [...] From my quick search, it appears that the Debian feature request is still open, and no other distro is using torrc.d yet. But you should check, too.
I went through all Tor packages listed here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/packages and no distros shipped a torrc with %include line enabled.
I know Whonix will not use torrc.d before next stable version. I also did a grep -r -i "%include" on Tails source code and I do not think Tails has enabled it by default.
nickm suggested proposed to create a new syntax to take care of the compatibility:
%include /etc/torrc.d/*.conf
Here is my thoughts on this:
1. I agree that "[a]nybody who currently has a working setup will have it fail if we start requiring a suffix that they didn't know to provide", which is not good for compatibility. But, letting people still use or will be able to use a setting that is not recommended anymore seems also not to be a very good idea? Considering the potential danger of parsing all the files, shall we go a little bit aggressive? I would rather break people's current potentially dangerous settings. What do you think?
2. Since no distros I know has enabled this feature by default, I guess there are only a very small number of users has enabled this feature. Will an info in the release note saying "%include /etc/torrc.d/ will only pase files suffixed with .torrc files" be enough to inform them? Maybe we can even document the manual migration somewhere.
3. %include /etc/torrc.d/*.conf syntax is very flexible so that Tor does not have to decide which extension names should be parsed.
4. %include /etc/torrc.d/*.conf syntax explicitly says which extension name will be used rather than the implicit document.
5. But is it a good idea to make the syntax that flexible? For example, anon-connection-wizard will generate a torrc files in torrc.d directory, I (and maybe many other developers) prefer writing to a file that I can guarantee it will be parsed in most case. If I write to 40_anon-connection-wizard.conf but some people set to pase .torrc or anything else only, it will be not be very good? (I do not want anon-connection-wizard to touch /etc/tor/torrc)
Finally, do you think it is a good idea to switch to the ticket for further discussion to avoid cross posting and high volume on @tor-dev?
Thank you very much!
Best Regards, iry