Sunsetting Tor 0.4.8

The Tor Project has announcedthat it is planning to actively stop supporting Tor 0.4.8 and earlierC Tor versions soon.

Usually, we try not to break existing releases, even if they areunsupported, unless we have a pretty good reason. In this case, wehave several reasons. [...]

The most important reason is this: in 0.4.9, we have made someformer fields in our directory data obsolete -- specifically, TAPonion keys and familylines. Removing these fields will let us save a great deal ofclient directory bandwidth for everyone. This, in turn, will make allTor clients bootstrap a little faster, especially those on slowconnections. But when we remove these fields, clients and relaysrunning earlier versions of Tor will no longer work, since they expectthe TAP onion keys to be present. Therefore, in order to deliverimproved performance faster, we need to accelerate the date on which0.4.8 will stop working.

The target sunset date is currently September1,2026, after which any version prior to Tor 0.4.9 will cease to work onthe network. The first stable release in the 0.4.9.x series wasannouncedin February2026, and the Tor 0.4.8.x series reached end of life onJune1.