Since I am a new forum user who is not allowed to reply more than three times in a same topic, I have to edit my previous replies to say more.
@Patrick just in case you can not receive new edit notification.
I agree with you. anon-connection-wizard should read the previous bridge/proxy configuration from the file and adjust the default UI accordingly. Just like what Tor Launcher has been doing.
Conclusion:
According to the current knowledge I have, I strongly prefer the “edit marker approach” to the “output.conf approach”.
Argument:
Let’s compare the “edit marker approach” and the “output.conf approach” in three different aspects:
###Usability:
####“output.conf approach”
Hiding the /var/cache/anon-connection-wizard/output.conf file from users will force users to do the proxy/bridges setting through anon-connection-wizard, which will cause some potential problems.
For example, a user used anon-connection-wizard to configured the bridge and proxy setting for at least once. Later, for some reasons (like the guidance of an online docs/tutorial, the attraction of exploring) he/she decided to configure the bridge and proxy setting from /etc/tor/torrc file manually. However, his/her setting might have a conflict between the old one appended in the /usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc . Maybe the old bridge and proxy setting were not valid anymore, causing the Tor unable to connect successfully. However, there was no simply way that he/she could know the reason, because he/she see no error in /etc/tor/torrc setting.
What he/she can do is either starting anon-connection-wizard to configure nothing to remove the old setting, or removing the old bridge/proxy settings from both /var/cache/anon-connection-wizard/output.conf and
/usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc. Either way will greatly reduce the usability because it requires users to ask or search for the solution and then a lot of work.
####“edit marker approach”
In this case, when users want to edit bridge/proxy setting manually from /etc/tor/torrc, they will see the setting generated by anon-connection-wizard and realize they may need to delete them.
To make it even more user-friendly, we can comment things like below in the ‘/etc/tor/torrc’:
### BEGIN anon-connection-wizard ###
### You may need to remove the following block to let your manually configured proxy/bridges setting work
###The purposes of the files:
According to the wiki:
/etc/tor/torrc is designed as a Tor configuration file that may be used by user.
/usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc is designed as a Tor configuration file that should be only used by Whonix and should not be used by users.
The proxy/bridge settings is generated by users with the help of anon-connection-wizard, so the settings are considered as users’ configuration that naturally go to /etc/tor/torrc instead of
/usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc.
###Implementation and Maintenance cost:
The “output.conf approach” will create an extra file /var/cache/anon-connection-wizard/output.conf for the Tor configuration, making the Tor configuration in Whonix more separated/scattered.
The “output.conf approach” will also introduce a large amount of unnecessary work which includes: