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Re: Thoughts on changing our package names




On Nov 13, 2009, at 1:50 PM, Andrew Lewman wrote:

I've been meeting more and more tor users over the past few months who
are confused by our package naming.  They want to download a "tor
bundle" but instead get a "vidalia bundle". They don't understand what the difference between vidalia, tor, polipo, and the other stuff in our
bundles.  It's all Tor to them.

I have the same experience. Heck, when I was a novice Tor user I needed to go back to my browser and look at the filename that was downloaded to figure out where in my Downoads directory that Tor thing was.
I'd like to simply get rid of the installation bundles in favor of Tor
Browser Bundles for Windows, OS X, and Linuxes.  However, that fantasy
world is a ways off.  We need help fine tuning the browser bundles for
OS X and Linux.

I'm not sure this path is that great an idea. We currently have quite a few windows users run relays, and my intuition is that most of them are running the installation bundle, so Tor starts automatically when they boot their computer. Losing this option seems bad.

My next best thought is to simply name the installation bundles as such:

Tor-Installation-Bundle-for-(Windows|OS X)-(bundle version number).

The bundle versions can start off at 1.0 and work their way up with each
new release.  There would be package change logs to explain what's
different in each new installation bundle version.  Users will be able
to simply tell if they have the latest or not by comparing the bundle
version number.

I think this scheme is a good idea. We could still have some flexibility, and call our current bundle 1.0 for a start, and then move our way up to 1.1, etc; and when we feel an important enough feature gets implemented, we increment. But worrying about this version scheme seems to be not really necessary, as the versions only need to be monotonically increasing to not confuse the user.

Only -stable versions of Tor get a bundle version number as described
above. -alpha packages are still built the with the version numbers of
tor and vidalia as a distinction.  Alternatively, we could switch to
some nomenclature such as odd numbered major versions as -alpha, even
numbered major releases as -stable.  However, given how fast we switch
from -alpha to -stable, we'll be at Tor Installation Bundle for Windows
14.1 soon enough.

Why not keep our current way of naming stuff for alphas (calling the bundle Vidalia bundle, etc; and making it a little harder to find on the website so less unsuspecting users stumble across it the first time they try out Tor)? It seems that our testers should be able to cope.

Thoughts?

What does Matt think about rebranding Vidalia?


Sebastian