On 24/07/12 04:38, intrigeri wrote:
> 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?
Yes! I would be happy to work on that. I haven't done much work on the
documentation since the persistence volume but that's sound like the
perfect opportunity to catch up.
> 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?
Sounds like a great plan. Regarding the documentation, and to have a bit
more loose schedule we could write a first documentation in time for
0.13.x but then ask for translations only after a first debugging of the
whole thing, so between 0.13 and 0.14, and after fixing the
documentation a bit.
We could also add something else to the process: coordinate better and
earlier the writing of the documentation and the UI, so we agree on the
vocabulary, try to apply the relevant parts of the documentation style
to the UI, etc.
> [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,
--
sajolida
