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:

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

Help with distribution-wide improvements

Contact

Talk to us

  • A few of us are here.
  • Development mailing-list:
  • Private and encrypted mailing-list:
  • IRC: see https://tails.boum.org/contribute/
  • Web: https://tails.boum.org/