A bunch of people spend a dozen days together in July at the third
Tails developers yearly summit. This was a great opportunity to have
crazy hacking sessions in person, as well as to discuss where we are
heading to and how.
# Discussions
We mainly discussed the **growth of the project**: given the growing
number of users and our super-short release cycle, it is a challenge
to keep the project sustainable and maintainable in the mid/long term.
Our take on this is first reflected by our **updated roadmap**" [1]: we
now have a better vision of what we want to focus on for the next major
releases of Tails: the 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 milestones are now pretty well
defined, and we even were bold enough to draft goals for 3.0.
[1]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/roadmap
Another key aspect on this topic was that we need to **make it easier
to contribute** to Tails. We have listed many enhancements that could
be made in this direction, especially on the website [2]. We also have
identified areas that could benefit most from a few new dedicated
contributors. We will publish targeted calls for help in the next few
months.
[2]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=115
We also **redesigned our communication channels** to ease involvement
of new contributors, to make more workload sharing possible, and to be
able to provide better user support. In short:
* Our mailing-lists see quite a lot of traffic these days.
This might deter people from reading it. So, we will create two
specialized mailing-lists: a private, encrypted one will receive
bug reports, while a public one will be dedicated to user support.
* A growing FAQ will be assembled: it will be a tool for
self-service help, and should make support work less repetitive.
* In a few months, we will evaluate how all this fares and we will
reconsider web support, which is postponed for the moment.
Still, the tails-dev mailing-list remains the main communication
channel for development and project-wide discussions.
This summit gave us the chance to **evaluate and refine processes**
that we have set up a year ago, such as our time-based release
schedule and a formal merge policy.
To end with, the **public development meetings** experiment will be
extended, and we will go on having monthly **Low Hanging Fruits
sessions**. Not only these sessions are very useful to make Tails
better, but we were happy to see new people join these parties
recently. We hope to see even more of that in the future: these
sessions are great times to **start contributing** to Tails!
# Hack
Hours of meetings were certainly a necessary part of the summit, but
we also dedicated a fair share of our time to hands-on activities.
Fortunately there is quite a lot of room for improvements in Tails, so
we were never left unoccupied.
The most noticeable technical change that happened during the summit
was perhaps [our **move to Redmine** [3] for managing our tasks [4] and
plans [5]. We are not exploiting the full potential of Redmine yet, but
it already feels far less messy than how we did previously. Hopefully
this will help others get involved! Many thanks go to Riseup for hosting
the Redmine instance we use. Note that we will keep using ikiwiki for
blueprints [6].
[3]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails
[4]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=108
[5]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/roadmap
[6]
https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/
Taking advantage of Redmine, we have started classifying tasks in
various useful ways: e.g. **easy tickets** [7] do not require much
knowledge of the Tails internals to be solved, and are ideal places to
get involved. In passing, other nice custom queries provide lists of
tasks involving sysadmin [8] and web development [9].
[7]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=112
[8]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=113
[9]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=115
We spent some time listing problems with early builds of **Tails based
on Debian Wheezy**. It is now clearer to us what remains to do: a few
dozens tickets [10] were created. Did we mention that any kind of help
is warmly welcome? :)
[10]
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/6015
Our **Jenkins instance** also had been taken care of: it is getting
closer to something we can use and rely upon as part of our
daily workflow.
A lot of branches were **merged for the upcoming 0.20 release**,
including the installation of Dasher and a first step towards the
replacement of TrueCrypt.
The **Pidgin and OTR documentation** was rewritten [11] to be
clearer and more precise, as well as our explanation of the way random
nicknames are generated for Pidgin accounts.
[11]
http://git.tails.boum.org/tails/tree/wiki/src/doc/anonymous_internet/pidgin.mdwn?h=doc/better-pidgin-and-otr-documentation
More steps have also been done towards **not starting Iceweasel**
on startup.
# At the end is the beginning
As you can guess, this summit was as intense as the previous ones.
Tails is living decisive times, so we expect the next year to be
pretty interesting. *You* can perhaps make the difference, so do not
hesitate joining the dance [12]!
[12]
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/
--
Tails folks
