Re: tor web-browser doesn't work on musl

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 01:02:24PM -0300, Daniel Simon wrote:
> By what I could find, nobody has compiled the tor web-browser from
> source on musl before.
> I can't find any packages for it...
> I'll try to make a new email and send it to both mailing lists (musl
> and tor) then we can talk to them directly.
> Thanks for all help so far.

One thing to note: the whole point of Tor Browser Bundle is to avoid
all sorts of side-channel/information-leak risks associated with just
using a normal web browser build on Tor. If anything showing that your
Tor Browser Bundle is built against musl rather than glibc leaks out
to the network, this would compromise much of the benefit of the
package -- there are relatively few musl desktop users, and even fewer
who use Tor Browser, so it becomes much easier to identify you. Of
course it would be ideal if they _always_ used musl, and fully
static-linked, so that there wouldn't even be any risk of glibc
version information (from the system-wide glibc) leaking over the
network.

Rich


> On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 7:07 AM, Alba Pompeo <albapompeo@gmail.com> wrote:
> > How could I build the Tor Browser Bundle from source?
> > I can't find any guide for it.
> > If someone has ever done this, could you share the binary that works on musl?
> > Could TBB be packaged to musl systems (void, alpine, etc) or is it
> > only available as a downloadable binary?
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 6:45 AM, Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org> wrote:
> >> On Sun, 24 Apr 2016 11:01:12 -0300
> >> Daniel Simon <ddanielsimonn@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi, I face a bug when running tor-web-browser from my new system that uses musl.
> >>>
> >>> 1) wget https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/5.5.4/tor-browser-linux64-5.5.4_en-US.tar.xz
> >>> 2) tar zxvf ./tor-browser-linux64-5.5.4_en-US.tar.xz
> >>> 3) cd tor-browser-linux64-5.5.4_en-US
> >>> 4) ./start-tor-browser.desktop
> >>>
> >>> EXPECTED: tor web browser launches as it does on glibc systems
> >>> WHAT HAPPENS: Nothing
> >>>
> >>> I assume there is a fix...
> >>> Thank you very much.
> >>
> >> You can not really expect a precompiled binary that is linked against
> >> glibc work on a musl libc system.
> >>
> >> There are 3 possible solutions:
> >> - run the pre-compiled binary on a glibc system
> >> - ask the tor browser developers to provide a binary built with musl libc
> >> - build it from source yourself
> >>
> >> -nc