1. Releases
  2. Code
  3. Documentation and website
  4. User experience
  5. Infrastructure
  6. Funding
  7. Outreach
  8. On-going discussions
  9. Press and testimonials
  10. Translation
  11. Metrics

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 2.0.1:

  • Upgrade Tor Browser to 5.5.2.

  • Fix regression breaking boot on 32-bit UEFI platforms. (#11007)

Code

  • We will replace Vidalia (#6841), which has been unmaintained for years, in 2.2 with:

    • the Tor Status GNOME Shell extension, which adds a System Status
    • Onion Circuits, a simple Tor circuit monitoring tool.

  • Hide "Laptop Mode Tools Configuration" menu entry. We don't support configuring l-m-t in Tails, and it doesn't work out of the box. (#11074)

Friendlier build system

For years Tails has offered a build system based on Vagrant, which at times has been maintained and really easy to use, and so a great resource for new contributors that want to test their modifications. Sadly that was a while ago, mostly because all but one Tails developers have been using their own custom build systems. The main reason for that is that Vagrant uses Virtualbox by default, while all of us (and our infrastructure, for example our Jenkins automated builds and tests setup) greatly prefer the QEMU/KVM stack (and libvirt), and it is not possible to mix two hypervisors at the same time.

But this is about to change! Recently there has been quite an effort to migrate to vagrant-libvirt and the QEMU/KVM hypervisor which should allow all of us to converge to the same build system. Besides saving development time since only one system has to be maintained, it also means that this build system will be well-maintained in the future, and so remain easy-to-use for contributors.

There are a few roadblocks still, though, but you can help, especially if you are a Debian developer! Currently we need vagrant-libvirt (and ruby-fog-libvirt) packaged and maintained in Debian, and quite a lot of work has already been done on that front. And to have the build system working on Debian Jessie we need the following packages backported: vagrant, ruby-excon, ruby-fog-core and ruby-fog-xml. If you want to help, please get in touch with us on the tails-dev@boum.org public mailing list!

Shell scripts are evil

Shell scripts are deceptively easy to quickly prototype proof-of-concepts with, but generally result in things with subtle bugs, a high maintenance burden, and difficulties to be extended since it doesn't scale well with complexity. A lot of people (us included) delude themselves with that they know the shell, but it is a complicated mess with really strange "features" and conventions that few truly understand.

Therefore we have started an effort to port our shell scripts to Python, and, implicitly, to make it more convenient to start writing new scripts in Python instead of shell.

If you are into Python and want to help Tails, come join us!

Documentation and website

  • The blueprint for Porting Tails to Debian Stretch has been updated.

  • Multiple commits were made to speed up the build process of the website. (#11151)

  • We added more organizations to our list of organizations offering Tails training.

User experience

  • There is now a blueprint for Porting Tails Installer to OS X

  • We're now also publishing torrents for betas and RCs (Closes: #11126)

Infrastructure

  • The ISO build system has been upgraded to Jessie.

  • Our test suite covers 208 scenarios.

  • In February 603 ISO images were automatically built and 597 were automatically tested by our continuous integration infrastructure.

Funding

  • We sent our final report for the Digital Defenders grant we had over 2015.

Outreach

Past events

Upcoming events

  • The Freedom of the Press Foundation organizes several workshops on Tails at the Whitney Museum in New-York, USA.

On-going discussions

  • A discussion about Creating personas to visualize our user base has been started.

  • The discussion about persistent Tor state is still ongoing.

  • A blueprint about Endless upgrades has been added.

  • A blueprint about ARM platforms has been added.

  • Research on porting the tails installer to windows has been done. (#8558)

Press and testimonials

Translation

All website PO files

  • de: 43% (2456) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 39% words translated
  • fa: 51% (2933) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 58% words translated
  • fr: 54% (3075) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 57% words translated
  • pt: 28% (1641) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated

Total original words: 57704

Core PO files

  • de: 88% (1210) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 87% words translated
  • fa: 80% (1100) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 74% words translated
  • fr: 81% (1116) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 77% words translated
  • pt: 71% (974) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy, 68% words translated

Total original words: 14624

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 547670 times this month. This makes 18885 boots a day on average.
  • 21378 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 138 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.