Tor 0.4.1.6 in master and 18.04 but not 19.07…?

Any specific reason for $subject? How is it possible that an older branch is more up to date than a more recent branch?

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Feed configs:

You can look at the "Up-To-Dateness"

  • 18.06 last commit on Tue Dec 10
  • 19.07 last commit on Fri Dec 13

Tor

  • 18.06 = PKG_VERSION:=0.4.1.6
  • 19.07 = PKG_VERSION:=0.4.0.5

The tor update was made in the commit 47a9d747611616b836b32537f27ec4bee0109829 to 0.4.0.5 on Sun May 5.
The tor update to 4.1.6 was made in commit 2986916b81a4f278664b7f1e2be80fd0d7cb400f on Thu Nov 14.

They use two different branches upstream/openwrt-19.07 and upstream/openwrt-18.06.

I think 19.07 is still some kind of release canidate? I think they do something like fixed releases and not like rolling releases, that they have to backport everything to have some kind of stable system. It is the same problem that you have in Debian that you get outdated software. And the package feed is community maintained. Noone backported the stuff to openwrt-19.07, probably people stick to openwrt-18.06.

Actually, I believed that they were just updating the commit version of the upstream master regularly. I did not know, that they have to backport everything and do seperated branches. Thanks for your question! Know I now more about OpenWrt. :slight_smile:

Please, feel free to make a PR updating Tor to the latest version! I think this is very important. Otherwise, I will do it. :slight_smile:

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Please, do! I don't have the possibility to do it at the moment.
In any case, there should be some sort of criteria that wouldn't allow an older branch to be updated before a newer one… something akin to what happens with the Linux kernel (mainline and stable trees).

People tend to agree with you; or at least can identify with what you see as a drawback of this development method:

(There are other threads for version 17 as well.)


And I believe @jow has the most poignant quotes related to your concern:

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Old branches only get selected backports. Otherwise they'd basically be master.

One thing to look at is the last common commit with master to know how "up-to-date" a branch really is for most of its content. Another measure is the number of commits on master that aren't on the branch in question.

18.06

jeff@deb-devel:~/devel/openwrt$ git log -1 --pretty="%cd" $(git merge-base openwrt/openwrt-18.06 openwrt/master)
Tue May 15 12:42:40 2018 +0200

jeff@deb-devel:~/devel/openwrt$ git log --pretty=oneline openwrt/master ^openwrt/openwrt-18.06 | wc -l
4771

19.07

jeff@deb-devel:~/devel/openwrt$ git log -1 --pretty="%cd" $(git merge-base openwrt/openwrt-19.07 openwrt/master)
Tue Jun 11 01:49:44 2019 +0200

jeff@deb-devel:~/devel/openwrt$ git log --pretty=oneline openwrt/master ^openwrt/openwrt-19.07 | wc -l
1484
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Well, apparently the version bump author made a PR for getting the version bump in master, and then also for the old 18.06, but ignored the new stable 19.07 branch ( which was only 5 months old at that point...).

master: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/10190
18.06: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/10549

I will cherry-pick those.
No reason why 0.4.1.6 would not work in 19.07 as it works in master and 18.06 (and the history between master and 19.07 only differs by two simple commits).
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/commits/openwrt-19.07/net/tor
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/commits/master/net/tor

EDIT:
cherry-picked. Buildbot should build them in the next 1-2 days.

6 Likes

Wonderful! Building a new image as I'm writing this. Thanks a lot for the quick turnaround, @hnyman.

Hi, just to clarify the reason why the version in 19.07 was older than in 18.06.
I cherrypicked changes from master to 18.06.
The main motivation was, that version in 18.06 (0.3.2.10) was EOL and tor started to remove relays with this version from tor network. (https://blog.torproject.org/removing-end-life-relays-network)
The version in 19.07 was still supported so I didn't update it.

My understanding was, that 19.07 is in feature freeze mode and it should only receive security and important bugfixes.

I'm not sure why that quote was attributed to me; but good information and welcome to the forum community.

Heh. It was probably quoted from your reply to my post. :wink:

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Even Tor has different releases. :open_mouth: Inception style... XD

https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-0425-also-0417-0406-and-0359