Re: Compiling my own version?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 06:28:46PM -0700, Hideki Saito wrote:
> I write Japanese Tor information page,
> http://www.anime.net/~sasami/ura/tor.html and as a part of the page, I have
> my own compiled version (that usually compiled within a day after any
> dev-build is published), which I believe is pretty much same thing offered
> in official Tor page, maybe different compiler version. (but in case of
> critical bugs, CVS code is incorporated as case-by-case basis with some
> amount of testing, such as that Win32 crash bug I was looking at other day.)
> 
> I'm guessing license-wise, it is okay to distribute the code, but are there
> any identifier I should put in the version?

It's ok license-wise to do this, though you should consider including the
LICENSE file, or otherwise making it known to your users that it's free
software and they too can fetch the source and do what they want with it,
under its license.

> For example, GnuPG people requested me put -hs identifier in the version
> number, to distinguish between an official build, but I'm guessing doing so
> with tor causes servers to refuse my connections...

It doesn't cause servers to refuse your connections. But it does cause
the *clients* to detect that they're not running a recommended version.
(They download a directory every 10 minutes, and the directory lists
the recommended versions.)

So I'd recommend that you leave the version intact from the code you
derived your binary from. Please try to refrain from making really
dramatic changes, since then it's not "really" that version any more.
And if you find yourself making the same patch for several versions
in a row, please consider sending us the patch so we can put it in the
main tree.

Thanks,
--Roger