Unfortunately, we still have something like 2500 relays on either Tor 0.2.9-LTS or Tor 0.3.5-LTS.
What are the reasons for this? My guess is the top 5 most common responses are:
- "I didn't know that Debian's backports repo has latest-stable Tor!"
- "I didn't see the Tor Project repos mentioned in Tor's Relay docs!"
- "I'm running a distribution that Tor Project doesn't have repos for."
- "I rolled my own custom Tor from git and forgot about it."
- "My relay machine was not getting any updates at all. Oops."
Does anyone have a reason that they think many other relay operators also share?
How can we fix that for you, or at least, how can we make it easier to run the very latest stable series Tor on your relay?
- "I followed the official torproject documentation for Debian/Ubuntu which says 'apt install tor' in the first option" (before the relay guide has been introduced - which points to option two) https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en
- "I run vanilla debian and don't want to trust any third party or backport repos if not necessary"
- "I want to run a relay with minimal effort and LTS releases happen less frequently -> less effort"
- "If I update my relay frequently my cw decreases"
- "Roger said tor 0.3.5 is especially stable, we like more stable software" (see the emails send out to operators on https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/network-health/2019-September/thread.... )