[Tails-dev] Fwd: Critical Usability Issue due to which I Hav…

Hello, I've decided to forward my unanswered query to the public mailing
list. *Tails developers and Tails Foundations team*, please check this. I
welcome opinion from anyone though.
Thank you in advance.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Internet Spam <dpilspam@???>
Date: Tue, Dec 19, 2022 at 10:42 PM UTC
Subject: Fwd: Critical Usability Issue due to which I Haven't Used Tails in
Years
To: <tails-support-private@???>


Hello, (I don't need PGP, please don't ignore this,)
I sent the email message reproduced below and forwarding it to you since I
didn't get any reply yet as of writing. I have issues that *I request that
you'll forward to the Tails developers*. TL;DR: I wrote about three things,
in this order: (1) Firstly, I wrote about the *OOM-killing situation in
Tails, which needs to be addressed directly by the Tails developers or the
Tails Foundations team* dealing with Debian/distribution work; (2)
secondly, I mentioned *my personal stance regarding VRAM wiping* on
shutdown; (3) finally, I asked *whether I can do a manual upgrade of Tails
from a very old version* to the latest stable version.

Please *don't* reply with instructions for debugging or troubleshooting, as
they're unnecessary -- but you're free to express your disagreement with me
on this, *provided that you don't jump to hasty conclusions* and have read
my message.
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but after various email messages and
WhisperBack reports *over the past six or seven years or so, it feels like
you're actively ignoring me*.

Thank you.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Internet Spam <dpilspam@???>
Date: Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 2:41 AM UTC
Subject: Critical Usability Issue due to which I Haven't Used Tails in Years
To: tails@??? <tails@???>, <tails-foundations@???>


Hello. First of all, *do not dismiss this email please. I live in a free,
democratic country *where my human rights are respected; I don't use PGP
but I don't require its use for this matter. *If you're not an official
member of the Tails developers team, then please forward this email to
them!* In the past, when I used to use Tails, I used both WhisperBack and
the helpdesk mailing list to contact you regarding this matter; either you
did nothing about the issue, or the helpdesk person dismissed my report as
if I should do more troubleshooting or my hardware is faulty or whatever
(don't remember, but it doesn't matter actually).

The issue is this:
Tails runs without any swap space (obviously, to maintain amnesia), the
entire system may lock up at any moment due to heavy memory usage and
opening of many Web browser tabs (which I usually do), the Magic Sysrq
functionality of manually invoking the OOM killer in such emergency
situations is disabled by default in Tails (and there's no way to enable
without rebooting, and it's not recommended to enable it when connecting to
the Internet as it's insecure), and Tails bundles no userspace early OOM
daemon enabled out-of-the-box (such as systemd-oomd).
*The very least you can do is ship a new version of Tails *with a slightly
modified configuration value under /proc *to enable the Magic Sysrq-F key
combination*. I request that you also consider shipping *systemd-oomd
enabled by default* in the next major release of Tails (i.e. version 6.0).

(I want to use this opportunity to express my stance regarding *video RAM
erasure during reboot*: I don't think that the fact that something cannot
be done perfectly is a good excuse to refrain from doing it at all, i.e. if
something cannot be done 100% well, it's better to do even 20% of the job
rather than 0%; at the same time, I don't ever expect you to ship spaghetti
code, so I don't expect you to write a half-assed implementation that does
20% of the job, despite what I said earlier. I request that you research
solutions that you can implement in the short term to at least try to erase
the VRAM during reboot.)

Related to this:
I have a USB flash drive with Tails, installed using Tails installer, with
an encrypted persistence, up-to-date as of around 2019-2020, with an early
(stable) version of Tails 4.x if I remember right. My question is this: Can
I do a manual upgrade to the latest stable version of Tails 5? (Could I do
a manual upgrade to 6.x when it would be released?) When doing manual
upgrades, what are the earliest versions supported? *Is such an old version
of Tails supported for manual upgrades using Tails installer in the latest
stable Tails? Should I back up my encrypted persistence *before doing
anything, or do you not expect such a manual upgrade from Tails 4.x to the
latest Tails 5 to cause data loss?

*Tails developers: please acknowledge that you received this email ASAP, at
least so I would know that you got it, even if you have no answers yet.*

Thank you very much.