% Contributing to Tails by working on Debian % intrigeri % December, 2014
Minimize the delta!
That is?
- diverge by the smallest possible amount from upstream
- especially from Debian
- Tails is mostly glue around existing code
Why?
- maintainability
- sharing our work with the rest of the Free Software community
Does it work?
- 5 years later, Tails is still alive
- less modified packages in Tails/Wheezy than in Tails/Squeeze
- will be even better in Tails/Jessie
- in 2014, at least 7 Tails contributors have contributed to Debian
Tracking Debian bugs affecting Tails
Debian Bug tracking system
- Debian's tracker for problems and tasks:
https://bugs.debian.org/ - email-based interface
- package-centric but some distribution-wide features
usertags
We use usertags:
- user = tails-dev@boum.org
- tags: whatever we need, that's our namespace
(e.g.crypto-gui
,hardening
,im
) - all our usertagged bugs:
https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=tails-dev@boum.org - documentation: https://wiki.debian.org/bugs.debian.org/usertags
Redmine
Tails work that needs to be done in Debian: https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=138
How can I help?
Help maintain backports
- we use a lot of backports
- e.g. poedit, shared-mime-info, libvirt, qemu, redmine, monkeysign
- we could use more, e.g. the Xorg stack
Help maintain packages
- mat
- libgsecuredelete and nautilus-wipe
- OTR-related packages: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/OTR
- anonymity-related packages: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/AnonymityTools
- anything else Tails relies upon, e.g. GNOME
- anything else our infrastructure uses, e.g. libvirt/qemu, Jenkins, ruby-rjb
Help with distribution-wide improvements
- AppArmor support: https://wiki.debian.org/AppArmor
- Reproducible builds: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
- Hardening: https://wiki.debian.org/HardeningWalkthrough
- Keep Debian Live development branches good enough for our needs, e.g. via automated testing.
- Keep Debian awesome.
Contact
Talk to us
- A few of us are here.
- Development mailing-list: tails-dev@boum.org
- Private and encrypted mailing-list: tails@boum.org
- IRC: see https://tails.boum.org/contribute/
- Web: https://tails.boum.org/