Is the experimental version the same as the stable?

Support Relay Operator
1

I’m working on a personal project, which I hope to release for the community any time soon. However, upon testing it, if I install the experimental version of Tor, I get the 0.4.8.11 version, which is the same as the stable.

On the other hand, nightly is working fine, as I get 0.4.9-alpha-dev.

The repositories I’m using to get the experimental version are the following:

deb     [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org bookworm main
deb-src [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org bookworm main
deb     [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org tor-experimental-bookworm main
deb-src [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org tor-experimental-bookworm main

The last two are supposed to be added in addition to the main repos.

If it’s supposed to be like that now (since maybe it was in use before, but not any longer), shouldn’t they get removed from the technical setup guide?

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i’m use os is Debian Gnu/Linux 13…
help Me

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Experimental is more likely to have bugs, but it’s been fine for me. I use it on most of my relays.

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I know, but my question is about the version tags, since no matter which one I download (stable or experimental), I get the same version, 0.4.8.11.

Do you mind telling me what the version number that you are using is? What OS?

My concern is about the experimental version (not nightly) being the same version as the stable (at least when downloading for Debian bookworm and Ubuntu noble). I’m just trying to clarify if it’s an issue on my side, a bug, or if the experimental version tag is no longer used.

If it is indeed a bug, then it has to be fixed. If it used to be a thing but now isn’t, there’s no point in adding it to my project.

Remember, there are three different versions available to install on the technical setup guide:

  1. Stable
  2. Experimental
  3. Nightly

I’ll ask on the tor-dev mailing list if no operators know.

If anyone is willing to make a fresh installation in a container to help me out (docker, podman, LXC…), you can use DisableNetwork 1 in your torrc, so relaying is disabled.

Thanks

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So, I’m not sure what exatly is going on with the experimental version.

Have a look at the distribution releases, on bookworm (which has the stable release), you can see the version is 0.4.8.12, which just got released.

The nightly version is 0.4.9.0-alpha-dev, which is expected.

However, if you look closely, the experimental version was last modified one week from now (probably due to some automated process), but the version is 0.4.7.6-rc-1, which dates back to April 2022.

The reason it still downloaded version 0.4.8.11 even if I added the experimental repository is because it fetches the latest version, which happens to be the stable.

I wonder what happened. Apparently the experimental versions are no longer used, or at least not made publicly available before it becomes the stable release.

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