On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 12:53 PM, Henry de Valence <hdevalence@riseup.net> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 10:19:15AM -0400, Nick Mathewson wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 10:06 AM, nusenu <nusenu@openmailbox.org> wrote:
> > What is the Tor Project's motivation for providing RPMs (instead of
> > relying on the RPM distro maintainer)?
>
> Frankly, I don't know. I don't actually install Tor from packages
> myself, since I'm nearly always running Tor from master.
>
> People who download our RPMs: in what way are they beneficial?

Given that maintaining packages is an ongoing effort that requires keeping
track of how the distribution is configuring their system, wouldn't it be
better to find a way to work with the existing distro maintainers so that, for
instance, the current Fedora RPMs could be the officially-endorsed Tor Project
RPMs?

Some time ago, there were no distro maintainers for Tor RPM packages, so you had to build them yourself - that's why I started making the packages. The situation has changed and the distro packages AFAIK have these drawbacks:

- IIRC there is 2 week wait until package appears (some rule for Fedora packages)

- no alpha packages

The permission problem is present only if you mix the packages (install from one repo, then from the other), because each one uses different users (affects mostly generated stuff like /var/lib/tor). I'd think that since distro maintainers exist now, it might be better to use their packages.

Ondrej