Re: [tor-talk] [Tails-dev] Tails Mac support

[intrigeri <intrigeri@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Maxim Kammerer wrote (22 Feb 2013 20:45:24 GMT) :
> Don't you already regret basing Tails off a binary distro
> like Debian?

Personally, I have to say I absolutely do not regret this.

> not only are you completely dependent on an upstream distro's
> features implementation cycle

I've no idea what misconceptions about Tails and Debian make you think
this, but this is incorrect in practice.

First, I fail to see what compiling binaries yourself buys you, in
terms of your level of dependency on "upstream distro's features
implementation cycle".

But anyway, let's debunk this myth before it propagates any further.
Most of the time, what prevents us from diverging from our various
upstreams (Debian, Tor, Torbrowser to name a few) are design decisions
and personal taste, and have nothing to do with basing our stuff on
a binary distro:

  * It was decided early in Tails development to treat long-term
    maintenance as a very important criterion -- and generally, the
    smaller the delta we have to carry ourselves, the easier
    the maintenance.

  * We quite like to share tools, have them used by more people rather
    than just Tails users, maintain them with other people and not on
    our own. We quite dislike inventing wheels that only fit on the
    Tails car.

All this is no news, should be quite easy to get when reading a bit
about Tails development, and has been documented for a while on our
"Relationship with upstreams" page:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/relationship_with_upstream/

So, yes, e.g. having UEFI support added to Debian Live makes sense to
me, as opposed to implementing in a Tails-only way and maintaining it
forever. Sure, it sometimes means we get the feature a bit later
(which is not that clear in this specific case).

> you are missing the opportunity to learn new things while
> implementing those features yourself.

If you intend to go on writing such bold public statements about
Tails, then I'd rather give you first-hand information that you can
base your affirmations on. Here we go, then. My experience absolutely
does not match your assumption. I'm personally quite happy with how
I've been learning new things when implementing features for Tails, be
it when writing Tails-specific software, or when implementing the
feature upstream, or when working to make Debian an awesome platform
to build the next Tails generation upon.

> I mean, Libertà was the first Linux distro to ship with a
> UEFI Secure Boot-based trusted boot chain

Congrats.

> do you think you will ever be able to say something of the sort
> about Tails?

Historians could probably build long lists of such things that could
be said about Tails, but life's too short for me to do this work :)

Cheers,
-- 
  intrigeri
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