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Reintroduce I2P

In order to get I2P back into Tails we primarily need someone to keep I2P nicely integrated in Tails in terms of user experience, security and similar, by improving the existing integration and also closely following the upstream developments and and syncing with it (e.g. making use of new features/configurations that makes sense for Tails’ use case). To get some idea of what this could mean, here are some examples of work we did in this area:

  • the I2P Browser.
  • monitoring of the I2P bootstrapping process => notify users about its progress or failures.
  • the pre-configured Pidgin account for Irc2P.
  • configuring I2P itself to be in “Hidden mode” (i.e. don’t be a relay) since the way Tails often is used (no persistence, abrupt shutdown) otherwise would leave dead relays on the network, hurting its performance.
  • AppArmor profile for I2P.

Let’s call this person the Tails-I2P liaison. This person will need solid general Linux skills, as well as decent knowledge of I2P. Yeah, that’s vague, but let’s say that if you look at the diff of the removal of I2P and don’t get scared (possibly excluding the stuff under the features directory, which is our automtaed test suite), you probably have what it takes. anonym will mentor this person about Tails development (e.g. building images will be a requirement for the liaison’s tasks).

The Tails-I2P liaison’s jobs are:

  • to test new I2P releases in Tails:
    • let us know when we should import the I2P package (i.e. when tests are good).
    • provide us with patches for any changes needed (e.g. new feastures/preferences/etc).
  • in general improve the I2P-integration in Tails.
  • And for the actual reintroduction we also want to be shown work and commitment that gives us hope that this effort will be kept maintained for a long time, and not abandoned shortly after the first few releases where I2P has been reintroduced. What I’d prefer to see here is:
    • Tails Greeter option for enabling I2P
    • a solution for #8280
    • fixing the I2P bootstrapping monitoring: there is a sleep 240 in wait_until_i2p_builds_a_tunnel which I find quite unacceptable. I don’t even recall the specifics about this issue, and sadly we do not have a ticket, so an investigation of why we ended up having to do this will be required.

(When it comes to the Deiban packaging, it is currently done by zzz, the I2P Project Manager. zzz ideally does not want to be the Debian package maintainer, but the Tails-I2P liaison does not necessarily have to be the replacement — that could be yet another person. Rationale: probably it will be easier to separate these responsibilities so the required skill-sets will be smaller.)

Step one to start working on this would be:

  • checkout a new Git branch
  • revert e9d02049b4086b3516224227dbb6d4c73f8ff159
  • add the deb.i2p2.de APT repo during the build, so I2P can be installed from there, since we don’t have the packages in our repos any more.
  • start hacking!

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Original created by @anonym on 12264 (Redmine)

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