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

[Daniel Simon <ddanielsimonn@gmail.com>]

Hi, Rich. Did you receive my other email that was sent to both mailing
lists (Tor and Musl)?
In it I listed a few possibilities and 1 of them was to
statically-link the binaries to musl.
Between other possibilities I included having separate binaries for
glibc and musl, but you show that's a bad idea.
Could you comment on the other email too, letting the Tor developers
also aware of this and showing that the best outcome would be
static-link to musl?
I wonder if there would be any difficulty for them to do so... Or
rather no difficulty, but lack of desire for change. I hope they're
flexible.



On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> 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