Find our May 2017 report online here:
https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2017_05/
Releases
========
* We've finished testing and releasing Tails 3.0~rc1.
* Tails 3.0 is scheduled for June 13th
[
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/calendar].
Code
====
## Tails 3.0
We have been focused on the last finishing touches before we deem
Tails 3.0 ready for release. Things are looking good so far!
## Reproducible builds
Here are some details about our work in April and May on making Tails
reproducible. This effort is covered by the Mozilla Open Source Support
award (MOSS) that we've received.
### Current status
In March we reported [
https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2017_03]] that
we had finally seen an ISO image build reproducibly on several machines.
Since then we kept working on this front.
Our automatic upgrades are now reproducible, however, one
remaining issue currently blocks us from claiming that our ISO images
are too. We are confident that this issue will be solved within a few weeks.
### Reproducible website build
In March we've made great progress to get our website build
reproducibly. Later on, we realized that ikiwiki resized some
images of our website which sometimes contained timestamped metadata,
thus making the ISO image build unreproducibly. We have worked around
this on
our side ([[!tails_ticket 12526]]), and will fix the root cause of the
problem in ikiwiki upstream ([[!tails_ticket 12525]]).
### The blocker: fontconfig
The cloud which hides the blue skies and the sun in the reproducible
builds solar system today, and which is our sole remaining problem to
make our ISO image build reproducibly is this: we ship a cache for fonts
in Tails. However, this cache is currently not generated in a
reproducible manner. In March we
tried moving its generation out of the ISO, however, it makes Tails
start slower and resulted in too many unreliable test failures. Thus, we
decided to move it back into the ISO image and to try and fix the root
cause of
the problem instead. We filed [[!debbug 863427]], but
we already know that our patch is not yet enough to fix the problem,
although it greatly reduces the number of differences from 75 to 5
([[!tails_ticket 12567]]); so we'll keep working on it.
### ISO image and IUKs
Our automatic upgrades are now reproducible ([[!tails_ticket 12630]]).
When we generate the ISO image using isohybrid, we pass it an ID. We
tried setting this ID to `$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` which resulted in a
reproducible, but non-hybrid, ISO. Thus, we decided to pass a fixed ID
instead: [[!tails_ticket 12453]].
### The bright future
Remaining technical issues are tracked on [[!tails_ticket 12608]].
We are working on documenting how to modify our release process to
ensure the ISO images we publish are reproducible
([[!tails_ticket 12628]], [[!tails_ticket 12629]]).
For those of our users who want to verify their own ISO builds against ours,
we'll soon document how to do that ([[!tails_ticket 12630]]).
### Infrastructure
See the Infrastructure section below for our work on the infrastructural
aspects of this project.
Documentation and website
=========================
- We have published the Tails Social contract
[
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/working_together/social_contract].
- We finished updating all our documentation to Tails 3.0, based on
Debian Stretch.
- We updated our documentation to a new layout of the *Universal USB
Installer* for Windows and scaled its screenshots to fix an issue
reported by [[!tails_ticket 11527]].
- We updated our documentation of the build system
[
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/build], as a result of the work on
reproducible builds.
User experience
===============
- We started experimenting with *Piwik* to do web analytics.
- We continued redesigning the main window of *Tails
Installer*
[
https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-ux/2017-May/003374.html].
<a id="infrastructure"></a>
Infrastructure
==============
- We upgraded some more of our systems to Debian Stretch.
- We have started to research Piwik as a candidate for a web analytics
platform
for our website ([[!tails_ticket 12563]]).
- We have continued the efforts to optimize our systems' resources, by
playing with different settings of the NUMA balancing ([[!tails_ticket
11179]]).
- We have adapted our CI infrastructure to be able to bring back the
email notification mechanism for build and test failures, at least for
branches which have tickets in a "Ready For QA" state in Redmine
([[!tails_ticket 11355]]).
This will be unleashed in June so that we'll be able to gather statistics
about false positives in our CI notifications to developers.
- Most of our efforts have been focused on upgrading our infrastructure
to support reproducible builds, see below.
## Reproducible builds
After a long discussion, we [[!tails_ticket 12409 desc="decided"]] not
to publish any Vagrant basebox at all: the key argument in favour of
this major design change was to remove one huge binary blob from the
list of trusted inputs needed for building a Tails ISO image.
This will substantially increase the value of Tails ISO images
building reproducibly. This decision has a few nice side effects,
including:
* the properties of the basebox required to build a given state of our
code base are entirely encoded in the corresponding Git commit;
* changes in the ISO build box definition don't require building and
uploading a new basebox.
Then we made enough progress to migrate our Continuous Integration
platform to the build system used by developers. This is now running
in production, not exactly smoothly yet (as explained below), but well
enough to keep supporting our development and quality assurance
processes. For details, see [[!tails_ticket 11972]],
[[!tails_ticket 11979]], [[!tails_ticket 11980]],
[[!tails_ticket 11981]], [[!tails_ticket 12017]], and
[[!tails_ticket 11006]].
Then we had to deal with a number of issues that we were not in
a position to identify before submitting this brand new system to
a real-world workload. Some are fixed already
([[!tails_ticket 12530]], [[!tails_ticket 12578]],
[[!tails_ticket 12565]], [[!tails_ticket 12541]],
[[!tails_ticket 12529]], [[!tails_ticket 12575]],
[[!tails_ticket 12606]]). Work is still in progress on some other
problems: they are our Continuous Integration engineers' top priority,
and should be fully resolved in the next couple of months.
Finally, we have [[!tails_ticket 12579 desc="set up"]] automated tests for
the reproducibility of our ISO image. Obviously, the results of these
tests
[are publicly
available](
https://nightly.tails.boum.org/reproducibly_build_Tails_ISO_testing/builds/).
Funding
=======
- We are still in the process of discussing our proposal with OTF, and
reworking it accordingly.
- We've submitted a proposal to Lush Digital
Fund [
https://uk.lush.com/article/introducing-digital-fund].
- We started migrating our European fiscal sponsor from Zwiebelfreunde
to CCT, the Center for the Cultivation of Technology
[
https://techcultivation.org/].
Outreach
========
Past events
-----------
* gagz and geb did a presentation and a workshop of Tails at the CPML
[
http://medias-libres.org] yearly meeting.
On-going discussions
====================
- We started to discuss the coordination of Tails 3.0 and Debian
Stretch releases
[
https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2017-May/011451.html].
- The news on the update of our build system received a lot of
answers
[
https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2017-May/011416.html].
Press and testimonials
======================
* 2016-08-05: A step-by-step guide on how to download, install, and
start using Tails, the world's most secure
platform
[
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/getting-started-with-tails-the-encrypted-leave-no-trace-operating-system/]
by Dan Patterson in TechRepublic.
Translation
===========
All the website
---------------
- de: 59% (2977) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 52% words
translated
- fa: 43% (2200) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 47% words
translated
- fr: 87% (4357) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 85% words
translated
- it: 31% (1585) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 28% words
translated
- pt: 28% (1443) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 25% words
translated
Total original words: 52.798
Core pages of the website
-------------------------
- de: 82% (1537) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 82% words
translated
- fa: 37% (695) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 39% words
translated
- fr: 98% (1843) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 98% words
translated
- it: 78% (1473) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 78% words
translated
- pt: 48% (910) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 49% words
translated
Total original words: 17.079
Metrics
=======
* Tails has been started more than 694.165 times this month. This makes
22.392 boots a day on average.
* 13.181 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
* 110 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.
