Tails documentation would greatly benefit from your help.
Good documentation is difficult to keep up-to-date. If you find a typo or an error in the documentation please let us know — ideally, by submitting a patch with your correction.
Find a task
The documentation on the website is not freely editable. The way we document things has serious security implications. People should be able to trust the Tails website as much as they trust Tails itself. Furthermore, every change in the documentation possibly breaks the translations that were made of the previous version.
But there are still many ways you can start contributing:
We maintain a list of documentation tasks. You can start writing a draft in the corresponding issue and then ask us for review.
Small fixes and enhancements to the current documentation are greatly welcome. This can be done by sending Git patches to tails-dev@boum.org or by sending us a Merge Request. In general, documentation changes should be based on the
master
branch.
We recommend you to build an offline version of the documentation to test your contributions before sharing them with us.
Guidelines and style
Tools
Find documentation pages impacted by changes in Tails
The bin/doc-impacted-by
tool takes two "states" (see its --help
)
of Tails, and checks the changes between these states against a
database of relationship between documentation pages and the source
files and packages impacting them.
The relationships between documentation and source files are stored in
doc-source-relationships.yml
in the Git root. It's YAML, and the
format is something like this:
The
pages
field is mandatory (after all, we want to find the documentation pages that might need to be updated). The remaining fields list source files and packages impacting these pages.All fields are interchangeable between the single and plural forms (e.g.
page
is the same aspages
). Similarly, the values can be either strings, or a lists of strings.All string values can use globs and pathspec magic features like
{foo,bar}
.
To use these tools, please first install the dependencies:
apt install ruby ruby-deep-merge ruby-git ruby-test-unit
Image compression
- Images on our website are compressed and cleaned using the
compress-image.sh script. To run this script you need the
trimage
andmat2
packages.
QR codes
To encode and decode QR codes, you can use the qrcode-encode.sh and qrcode-decode.sh scripts. To run these scripts you need to install the
qrencode
andzbar-tools
packages.For example (run from Tails' source root):
wiki/src/contribute/how/documentation/qrcode-encode.sh https://tails.boum.org/
Creates a QR code in tails_boum_org.png. And:
wiki/src/contribute/how/documentation/qrcode-decode.sh tails_boum_org.png
Outputs:
QR-Code:https://tails.boum.org/
Related pages
Talk to us
You can subscribe to tails-dev@boum.org, our development mailing list.
If you need input and don't know who to ask, mention @sajolida
on the corresponding GitLab issue.