Download webpage should be improved and provide older version with fever dependencies and upgrade procedure should include failover solution
It happened to be I lost fucntional instance of tor browser. That should not happen. I had 10.5.8
version but it automatically fetched an update, without even telling me what version I am at and what has it downloaded. Just in case I would copy the messages away for reference. After a restart the executable did not load. Now what?
In short, I realized https://www.torproject.org/download/ is pretty useless and does not tell me what are teh requirements of the binaries. Second, there are no link to older versions. I went to github but the release executable weren't there either. Then I found https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/ but guess what, the Linux 64-bit binaries were not present in each subdir. Luckily I found the old tor-browser-linux64-10.5.8_en-US.tar.xz in my Downloads folder and was able to zap the non-working installation to learn that the upgrades are indeed the culprit. Still I do not know what version tor is fetching. Too bad.
Finally, from
#40801 (closed) , #40693 (moved) and https://github.com/MeisterP/torbrowser-overlay/issues/55 I learned about the --verbose
which helped me to find out the problem with missing symbols,. Then it was simple to recompile gtk+ and after a while few more other libs.
Please include on the download page for download also binaries which do not require wayland. Please include a list of requirements. Please try to come up with a back procedure so that if the binary does not start after an update that one can revert to the previous binaires. I wonder how many users have lost Tor instance and cannot access the web anymore just due to this.
The shell wrapper should definitely not discard the STDERR output from the loader so I could have realized much earlier the binary incompatbility.
Hope this helps. :-)