Re: [Tails-project] Tails report for May 2017

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Author: R B
Date:  
To: Public mailing list about the Tails project
Subject: Re: [Tails-project] Tails report for May 2017
Question... the new tails 3.0 only allows for tails-amd64-3.0
Is there an ISO for Intel (i.e tails-i386-3.0)

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 7:44 AM, u <u@???> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
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