David A. Wheeler:
oh yeah, we all like curl. I wonder what kind of user needs curl, though.
You mentioned that some packages in Debian will "just work" if curl is working.
Can you name any of them? I think that would be very valuable info!
Sorry, what I meant was, "I expect that some packages in Debian will "just work" if
curl is working".
I don't have a specific list.
However, we try to add feature to Tails when they are improving something for
our personas (see https://tails.boum.org/contribute/personas/ ). In this
specific case, I think we don't have an example of how can curl, directly or
indirectly, help our personas.
It's really easy to add the configuration you propose to Tails. But it will add
to our QA process: if we tell our users that they can expect curl to work fine,
we'd better test it regularly!
All in all, the cost is low but not negligible, while the benefit for our
personas seems to be zero. So my personal opinion is that it's not worth it
*until* there is a clear use case that is helped by supporting curl.
Here again, I'm sorry for the huge delay in answering.
I wanted to complete a bit the picture on "who the heck would use curl"?
Daniel Moßbrucker used wget for his investigative journalism:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/how/user_experience/interviews/daniel
In his own words:
« For the research on child abuse, we used wget for most of our crawling
and it's super useful to have it already installed. »
« I wouldn't call myself a technology expert. I'm able to code a little
bit, but for sophisticated projects like these, I still need someone
with a real information security background to ask them how do certain
things, which tools to use, and to check and improve my 30 lines of
script. »
When we did the Tails workshop at Netzwerk Recherche in October, it was
really sweet to see Daniel advocate for wget as one of the really cool
tools included in Tails :)
There I also met other journos who have a bit of a technical profile and
investigate online data in ways that could totally benefit from wget and
curl.
In that regard (and many others), the personas on
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/personas/ are quite outdated, I think.
Thinking about these more techie-journos, curl could totally makes sense
in Tails.
That said, I haven't really read the other emails in this thread about
what it would take from a technical point of view; and it's true that
everything that we had to Tails, even as small as curl, can turn into
more maintenance work down the line.
David: Actually, I'm curious what made you suggest adding curl to Tails.
Did you had any particular use case or users in mind?
That said, clearly the Tails project already expects that some users will
install additional software. So I suggest modifying the documentation to
provide *some* tips to users on how to deal with differences when running on
Tails (in particular the network and dot files). The current documentation
never mentions torsocks or any other related issues. Then you don't have to do
more QA, and if later on someone raises a persona, you're a step ahead.
We've had https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/18013 for a
while but I never gave it enough prioritize to tackle it myself. I added
your suggestions there for now.
--
sajolida
Tails — https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
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