Re: [Tails-dev] Debian security / porting support and embedd…

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: adrelanos
CC: tails-dev, debian-derivatives
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Debian security / porting support and embedded codebases
Hi,

adrelanos wrote (26 Feb 2013 14:12:53 GMT) :
> Tails developers:
> How frequent are requests for armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, sparc,
> powerpc, Hurd ports?


(Tails developer hat on.)

Here we go:

  - arm*: quite a lot already, and I expect to see this grow seriously
    in the future as ARM -based laptops, tablets etc. get more and
    more popular.
  - powerpc: quite a lot until roughly two years ago, less and less
    since then.
  - others: none that I remember.


But obviously, Tails has a quite specific set of usecases and a quite
small userbase, so the fact nobody went as far as asking Tails
developers about support for another architecture certainly does not
imply that nobody is interested in running Debian (and, why not,
random software we ship, or may ship, in Debian) on it.

>> make it fully portable or there
>> is no point considering inclusion in Debian.


(Debian developer hat on.)

I would be surprised if the Torbrowser patches made Iceweasel any less
portable. It could be useful to confirm this, e.g. by building Tails'
Iceweasel + Torbrowser source package [1] on Debian architectures not
supported by the Tor project. Oh, here's yet another way to help :)

[1] git://labs.riseup.net/tails_iceweasel.git

> The point is: people are interested in anonymous browsers - there
> are none in Debian.


As mentionned about every time this situation is mentioned: there's
a plan that has got the agreement of the people who would be the most
impacted by the code duplication (namely: the Iceweasel maintainer and
the security team). Nobody had time to implement this plan or design
a better one yet. Anyone interested in *fixing* this situation should
go talk to Jérémy Bobbio <lunar@???>.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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