Hi,
the first phase of the incremental upgrades feature [0] development
is nearing completion.
Today, inside a Tails system, I ran [1] the update frontend against
a local web server that handed an update-description file along with
a matching IUK. I was asked graphically if I wanted to upgrade my
Tails system, which I gladly accepted. A few minutes later, I was told
the update had been successfully applied, was prompted to reboot, and
once started again, the system was indeed upgraded!
The actual IUK installation program was ready and quite well tested
for a while. What is new is that we now have the network, upgrade
logic, security and GUI bits all connected together.
The Tails-IUK suite (code: 80kB, test suite: 256kB) looks in good
shape to me. The only part that still needs a bit of love is the
frontend. See the "Bugs and Future Improvements" section [2] for
details. I consider everything listed there with severity >= serious
as a release blocker, and the rest as things that can be improved or
fixed later. As of now, there are only two remaining release blockers,
that I intend to tackle early in August, and then decide to call phase
one a thing of the past and cleanup the roadmap [3].
On the release side of things, it does not seem wise to push all this
directly out in the wild with all switches on: this piece of software
being intrinsically bound to the infrastructure, testing the whole
thing entirely can't really be done unless the software has been
shipped in a Tails release, which is not the case yet.
So, I'm proposing the following plan to release this feature:
1. As soon as possible, merge into devel the harmless part of the
feature/incremental-upgrades branch (users creation with sudo
credentials, dependencies installation), leaving aside the part
about running the update frontend automatically at startup.
=> Tails 0.13 should be able to incrementally upgrade to 0.13.x
2. When 0.13.x point-releases are out, write developers
documentation and tools, prepare IUK, update update-description
files, ask beta testers to try the incremental upgrade process.
Catch and fix most remaining bugs.
Write user documentation [4] and hand it to translators.
sajolida, do you want/plan to write the user documentation?
3. Once we're happy with the whole thing, ship it, enabled by
default, in the next Tails major release (that is, presumably
0.14, unless 1.0 is due already -- who knows :)
Thoughts?
[0] https://tails.boum.org/todo/incremental_upgrades/
[1] SSL_NO_VERIFY=1 DISABLE_PROXY=1 tails-update-frontend \
--override-baseurl https://10.0.0.1/tails
[2] https://tails.boum.org/todo/incremental_upgrades/#index9h1
[3] https://tails.boum.org/todo/incremental_upgrades/#index3h1
[4] https://tails.boum.org/todo/incremental_upgrades/#index4h2
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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