[tor-reports] Tails status report for July 2012

[tails at boum.org]

Here is the report of what happened around Tails in July, 2012.

People
------

One of us went to DebConf12 in Nicaragua.

The final steps towards a usable AppArmor in the next Debian release
(codename: Wheezy) were completed. Also, Vidalia 0.2.20-1 was granted a
freeze exception and will therefore be part of Wheezy.

It was also an opportunity to meet some unexpected users of Tails within
the Debian community.

We have received 43 private bug reports sent using WhisperBack.

656 messages were exchanged on the Tails web forum, with at least 104
answers signed as 'Tails'.

We had to work around a last minute change of plans for our annual
developer summit happening in August.

Code
----

We did release Tails 0.12.1.
<https://tails.boum.org/news/version_0.12.1/>

The whole ride to 0.12.1 was pretty painful. 0.12 contained nasty user
visible issues. Some last minute changes in package repositories used by
Tails had to be worked around. All this is convincing us that we need
to be able to provide pre-release ISO images to be tested by supporting
users. We also need automated tests and a more reliable system to deal
with upstream and Tails packages.

The data collection mechanism for WhisperBack is more flexible. It will
now send more logs from tails-greeter. Hopefully that would help to fix
a bug like one we had in 0.12 quicker.

The default mailbox path of Claws Mail has been fixed to lie in the
persistent directory.

Using precompiled locales is ready. Call for testing:
<https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-July/001342.html>

Work has been done to stay compatible with recent changes in
live-boot 3.x. Work has been done to move to live-build 3.x.

Incremental updates are nearly done, see:
<https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-July/001395.html>

A little more progress was made to port Tails to the next Debian release
(codename Wheezy).

We have updated our (VM based) build system to use the latest version of
Ikiwiki, as our 'mirrorlist' patch has finally been merged upstream.

On-going discussions
--------------------

Feedback on a proof-of-concept for automated tests:
<https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-June/001285.html> and
<https://tails.boum.org/todo/automated_builds_and_tests/>.

Using tlsdate?
<https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-July/001376.html>

htpdate and fingerprints:
<https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-July/001394.html>

Documentation and website
-------------------------

The new 'trail' ikiwiki plugin should help to have links from one page
of the documentation to the other. Preview available at:
<https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-July/001393.html>

Some pages of the website has been locked for security, but their
translations are still open.

Funding
-------

Karen from the Tor project worked with some of us to answer the call for
proposals made by the European Instrument for Democracy & Human Rights
(EIDHR). The call was directed toward projects that helps human rights
defenders to defeat cyber-censorship.  Our proposal mostly revolves
around several improvements to Tails: automated builds and tests to be
able to release more often, safer versions of Tails; better support for
bridge and pluggable transports; better support for recent and upcoming
computers; and translations improvements. We still don't have answers
for first selection round, we will see how it goes.

-- 
Tails folks