Re: [Tails-ux] New Greeter: read-only persistence?

Hi!

intrigeri:
> so far, Tails has been offering the option to unlock one's persistent
> volume in read-only mode; that is, the data is available to the user
> and programs, it can be read and seemingly modified, but any change to
> it is discarded when Tails is shut down.
>
> The new Greeter, that we merged a week ago into the branch where we
> are porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch), doesn't offer this option
> anymore. Alan explained me [1] that one the one hand, "Read-only
> persistence was not in the final mockups that were agreed for
> implementation"; and on the other hand, "it was not totally removed by
> design", and there has been discussion about *where* in the Greeter
> this option should be displayed.

> Thoughts, feelings, opinions?

We actually don't seem know how much this option is really used by
people and that makes it very hard to find a solution to your question /
proposal.

Whenever I did some workshops with Tails in the past, I had the
impression that it's indeed a corner case feature, used by very paranoid
people. But these people *are* part of our target user group, right?
Journalists, people in dictatorships etc. So to me it feels wrong to
drop this feature just like that because it did not fit in the mockups.

Then, I have the impression that we mix up several problems here: as you
say, there were problems reported with this feature, and we don't have
the time to reimplement this fast enough for Stretch.
And this sounds indeed like we should drop it.

The last thing you say is that we lack support and testing for this
option currently anyway. Adding it back to the greeter does not sound
like a regression then -because that's the current state of things anyhow.

Maybe the people who worked on the mockups could explain if this option
was simply forgotten or if it was dropped for a reason? That seems to be
two very different processes :)

Cheers!
u.