[Tor-BSD] Introduction

[George Rosamond]

Shawn Webb:
> On Mon, Aug 07, 2017 at 09:15:00PM +0000, George Rosamond wrote:
>> N.J. Thomas:
>>> * Shawn Webb <shawn.webb at hardenedbsd.org> [2017-08-04 21:17:14-0400]:
>>>> I'm happy to help out the Tor Diversity Project any way that I can in
>>>> whatever small spare time that I have.
>>>
>>> hi Shawn,
>>>
>>> Welcome aboard. Random question for you, last year at BSDCan you had
>>> mentioned you might take a stab at porting tor-browser to FreeBSD. Did
>>> you ever get a chance to try that? I'd be interested in any work you did
>>> on that front.
>>
>> Yes, and maybe you could update us on how the FreeBSD Tor Browser
>> hackathon went last week. I know not too much got done, but drawing some
>> lessons for others would be useful.
> 
> egypcio is taking point on the tor browser port to FreeBSD. At CharmBUG,
> we held a two-hour hackathon to help in those efforts. What we learned
> from the hackathon is that two hours isn't nearly enough time to get a
> team of six people hacking on the ports tree. We'd need at least a
> weekend (due to the time it'll take to get everyone on the same page).

Yes.  User groups hackathons on a complex piece of software like TB are
tough. You have a limited number of choices IMHO:

1. the software is ready for ports (which FreeBSD TB is not) and users
click and click to find bugs and crashes.

2. the users are all very technical, and can push the software along
even if not ready for the ports.

3. the hackathon sticks to a list of narrow, labor-intensive tasks that
can be resolved onsite then and there.

> 
> Once egypcio gets the port(s) to a production-ready state, I'll
> investigate merging his work fully into the HardenedBSD ports tree.
> We'll have PIE and full RELRO enabled by default for the browser itself.
> We'll additionally enable SafeStack with all the others as possible.

Cool. It doesn't make sense to do a separate porting effort from FreeBSD
IMHO.

g


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/tor-bsd/attachments/20170807/0fa1d021/attachment.bin>