Tails is becoming increasingly popular: lately, someone boots Tails every ten seconds somewhere in the world. And also, every six weeks, there is a Firefox security update and we subsequently release a new version of Tails.

Because of that amount of users and such a short release cycle, it is a challenge to keep Tails alive and getting better.

We needs more hands!

Among the things we know we should do in the next few years, we have identified some areas that could benefit the most from new dedicated contributors.

Today, we are talking of improving the infrastructure behind Tails. So, if you are a system administrator, a software developer, or anything in between, we need you! Please read on.

What is the mission?

The Tails system administrators set up and maintain the infrastructure that supports the development and operations of Tails. We aim at making the life of Tails contributors easier, and to improve the quality of our releases.

Our main tools are: Debian, Puppet, Git and Jenkins.

The most important, and larger pieces on our roadmap currently are:

• Continuous Integration: we want to drastically cut down the amount of work needed to prepare a Tails release; we also want to detect regressions as soon as possible. Everything we merge should go through an automated test suite, and our Debian packages should be automatically built from Git tags.

• Freezable APT repository: we need to freeze our APT repository when we freeze our release branch; this is also a first and important milestone on our way towards reproducible builds.

Exciting, uh? Needless to say, we also have plenty of smaller tasks on our plate :)

How can I help?

There are many ways to give us a hand in this area. Read more about it!