Do not bundle Tor Launcher in the main Tails Git repository

Back when bridges support was merged at the last minute for 0.23, it was considered acceptable on the short term to simply add a copy of the Tor Launcher into the main Tails repository. This was supposed to be a short-term hack that we will get rid of soon, hence this ticket so that it’s not forgotten.

For the record, bundling Tor Launcher in the main Tails repository has the following problems:

• it bloats the repo a bit (we could probably live with that)
• it makes reviewing painful: one has to review changes in our Tor Launcher repo first, and then compare with the copy that was pushed into the main repo
• I could not find any documentation about how to actually do the copy (not sure it’s a trivial copy, or if one needs to run some kind of make command first)

There are several ways we could fix this:

1. build a Debian package for Tor Launcher
2. use a Git submodule

I (intrigeri) am not convinced a .deb would be the best way to integrate Tor Launcher into Tails, and doing so adds quite some painful, repetitive work to the release process. So perhaps a submodule would be better, assuming our build system (including Jenkins setup, Vagrant) supports it, and assuming it can be documented so that every contributor can understand how the whole thing works.

Feature Branch: feature/8925-tor-0.2.6

Related issues

• Related to #7036
• Related to #7283 (closed)
• Related to #7620 (closed)
• Blocked by #7934 (closed)

Original created by @intrigeri on 7087 (Redmine)