monero-gui directly stored binaries in git is awful since git cloning over Tor (even just the current revision without history) times out when cloning from gitlab.
(And github rejects the repository size.)
du -sh usr/bin/*
16M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-ancestry
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-depth
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-export
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-import
11M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-mark-spent-outputs
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-prune
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-prune-known-spent-data
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-stats
14M usr/bin/monero-blockchain-usage
25M usr/bin/monerod
9.5M usr/bin/monero-gen-ssl-cert
31M usr/bin/monero-gen-trusted-multisig
32M usr/bin/monero-wallet-cli
107M usr/bin/monero-wallet-gui
4.0K usr/bin/monero-wallet-gui.AppImage
33M usr/bin/monero-wallet-rpc
Even if just shipping the compressed file would be too much.
121M monero-gui-linux-x64-v0.17.2.1.tar.bz2
If monero-gui was removed from source folder ~/Whonix/packages/monero-gui
, it would be no longer installed by default inside Whonix, also bad.
Whonix builds using Whonix’s build script could build using Whonix binary APT repository but that wouldn’t be a real build from Whonix source code where Whonix Debian packages are build from and installed from source. Seems awful to change the Whonix build design just for that.
A build script command line option --monero-gui true|false
would be feasible but that would also be very messy.
“If you want monero-gui, you additionally need to clone that repository. That will probably only work if cloning over clearnet. Otherwise your build will differ from original build. Oh, and after the build you’re also free to install the binary package from Whonix repository.” Messy.
Keeping monero-gui pre-installed is pretty important.
git LFS perhaps? Not free on github. And a 1 GB quota for downloads per month is nothing. Paying per GB would be a DOS opportunity.
gitlab has 10 GB for LFS but that’s also not much.
git LFS is in Debian.
Self-hosting a git LFS server seems overkill. That would add all the complexities of git LFS + a git LFS server. Instead, it might be easier to install a simple git server on whonix.org. Not a fully featued gitlab CE. Perhaps something simpler such as gitweb.
Then git clone over Tor wouldn’t be blocked obviously and no timeouts.
Existing git locations (gitlab, github) would be kept but when git cloning Whonix, it would be by default cloned from whonix.org.
(pull requests would still be welcome on gitlab, github. No changes. This isn’t an issue since git is federated.)
Perhaps gitweb.