Inquiries about status or the project / Current plans / etc

[nodens]

Hi!

We've talked in the past about adding Wahay to Tails. One of the prerequesites is to have it in Debian.

There have been a few experiment done on both front (Tails issue tracker is a good starting point).

So, in order to determine if we indeed want to invest ressources on it now, I'd like to know what the status of this project is?

How do you see the future (say, mid-term / long term)?

Thanks! :)

[olabiniV2]

Hi,

Thank you for the interest! Obviously it would be great to have Wahay in Tails.

We haven't touched the project for some time, but we are very interested in taking a look at it in the beginning of 2023. The most important focus for this release would actually be to add compatibility for Windows. But while working on that, we would also do a review of what updates are needed. One of the biggest would probably be to move over to using the Golang module system (since when we created the project, we still used vendoring). Using the module system makes packaging for Debian much easier.

We did do the work of packaging Wahay and all dependencies for Debian a while back, using our own repository. As part of the refresh, it would be high on my priority to try to get it in to Debian proper as well. Hope that sounds like a good path.

Cheers

[rafaelbonifaz]

This sound great, it would be great to see Wahay in Debian/Tails!

[nodens]

Hi, thanks for the timely reply!

This sound good to me. There will definitely be work on the deps, but I see you published your work for the packaging of all the dependencies, that's great ! Actually at some point it would probably make sense to join the Go team in Debian and maintain those directly there with people from the team sponsoring uploads.

I didn't review much yet, so I have no idea how much work it means to bring it to Debian at this stage, but you definitely took the first steps in the right direction. :)

I'll bring the info to Tails and we'll see how it goes.

Cheers!

[nodens]

Mhm, for some reason my reply above is missing a paragraph.

I meant to say that interoperability is good news from Tails standpoint, since it means it's more useful for Tails users.

Also, do you have any plans about video support at some point ? I believe audio is possible with mumble ?

Thanks!

[olabiniV2]

Hi @nodens - sorry for the long time in responding. First, we don't really have any plans for video, because the Mumble protocol is only focused on audio. We also believe that the latency situation might become a real problem with video over onion services.

[olabiniV2]

We also wondered if you can help us answer a question - one of my colleagues already asked it in the Tails bug tracker. Basically, which version of Golang is the oldest you think makes sense supporting? Currently, Tails has Golang 1.15, but Bullseye and Bullseye backports is already on 1.19. Since there are major changes in the versions, focusing on newer versions would definitely make things easier for us.

[nodens]

Hi,

Current Tails (5.x) is based on Bullseye. I didn't see anything go related in the package list, so there is no go version built in Tails AFAIK… Which doesn't really matter, because Tails doesn't have a build infrastructure for most packages: it just takes them from Debian, and that would be the plan here. Bullseye's Golang version as a minimum should be fine.