Re: [Tails-dev] [Feature #5968] additional software: install…

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] [Feature #5968] additional software: install arbitrary deb
hi,

sajolida@??? wrote (07 Aug 2013 12:20:30 GMT) :
> The feature #5968 of our Redmine says:


> « It might be convenient to have a way to automatically install custom
> Debian packages stored in the persistent volume. »


> Any opinion on this? Is this a desirable feature? How important would it
> be then?


If someone is interested enough to come up with a good implementation
of it, that doesn't look like asking for maintenance problems, then
I guess I'll be happy that Tails allows one to do this.

However, my gut feeling is that this only addresses rare corner cases,
in a way that removes some incitatives to address it in a better way
(e.g. maintaining that stuff in Debian, in the general case). Also,
this helps creating custom Tails systems that we'll have a hard time
providing good support for, since we can't reproduce things without
the private packages added by the user. I'm not entirely comfortable
with the whole thing.

To sum up, IMHO this is a very low priority thing, with an extra
"excellent patches are welcome" note on it. I'm insisting on the
*excellent* part, because to be honest, even spending much time
reviewing a preliminary patch would feel like wasting my time, while
we have plenty of more important issues to address.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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