Tails summit

Five developers met for our annual summit. The summit was less dense than last year but still very productive. See the detailed report.

Releases

There was no release in July. Tails 0.20 is planned for the 9th of August.

Metrics

  • 151 657 connections of Tails to the Tor network. This makes a boot every 17.7 seconds on average. This is an approximation from the requests made to the security announcements feed when Tails is connected to Tor.

  • 77 non-empty bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

Code

  • We had two low-hanging fruits sessions, that were mostly used to review and merge pending branches.

  • A lot of work has been done to migrate to Debian Wheezy:

  • A first build of Tails based on Debian Wheezy version was tested, and many bugs were identified.

  • The work on AppArmor was continued. An early upstream patch that aims to add support for stacked filesystems was tested.

  • The included Linux kernel was updated to 3.10-1.

  • A deprecation wrapper for Truecrypt was written. Many thanks to Julien Voisin for providing patches.

  • Dasher, a graphical predictive text input system, was installed.

  • The Wikileaks IRC server address was tentatively fixed. Many thanks to Julien Voisin for providing patches. User interface issues have prevented us from merging this branch yet.

  • Claws mail will no more display a dialog box when sending a message. Many thanks to matsa for providing a patch.

  • Many improvements to additional software have been merged.

  • A bunch of improvements to our test suite were proposed and reviewed.

Documentation and Website

  • The Promote page was fully rewritten.

  • A new page Website on how to improve the Tails website was added to the contribute section.

  • The page Translate was reworked in depth to match our new translation workflow using either Git or Transifex.

  • The Pidgin documentation was was fully rewritten.

  • The homepage was rephrased to mention Internet circumvention.

  • Our Tor enforcement policy was clarified on the About page.

  • The OpenPGP signature to verify the ISO images is now served directly by our website.

  • A prototype conversion of our test suite to use native ruby + rjb instead of JRuby was pushed to Git.

Localization and Internationalization

  • All Tails strings but the website are now translatable in Transifex.
  • i18nspector was uploaded to wheezy-backports.

Infrastructure

  • Our todo list items were migrated to Redmine.

  • Blueprints were extracted from our old todo section into the new Blueprint section to store our research and plans in a static form outside of Redmine.

  • Criterion to flag a task as easy were identified as a way to orientate better new contributors.

  • Our roadmap was updated and we defined our objectives for Tails 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0:

  • We started working on making our infrastructure more reliable: looking for a system that could act as a fail-over for our main server.

Funding

  • A short-term funding with sponsor Bravo has been tentatively confirmed and redefined, but not signed yet.

  • The contracts for the bounty program are still being signed. But some work has already been done and tested on Seahorse Nautilus, AppArmor, ikiwiki to Redmine, keyringer and libvirt.

  • We sent a concept note to answer sponsor Charlie's call for proposals.