[[!meta title="Call for help: improve the infrastructure behind Tails"]]

[[!meta date="Thu May 1 12:00:00 2014"]]

Tails is becoming increasingly popular: lately, someone boots Tails
every ten seconds somewhere in the world. And also, every six weeks,
there is a Firefox security update and we subsequently release a new
version of Tails.

Because of that amount of users and such a short release cycle, it is
a challenge to keep Tails alive and getting better.

We needs more hands!

Among the things we know [[!tails_roadmap desc="we should do in the
next few years"]], we have identified some areas that could benefit the most
from new dedicated contributors.

Today, we are talking of **improving the infrastructure behind
Tails**. So, if you are a system administrator, a software developer,
or anything in between, we need you! Please read on.

What is the mission?
====================

The Tails [[system
administrators|contribute/working_together/roles/sysadmins]] set up
and maintain the infrastructure that supports the development and
operations of Tails. We aim at making the life of Tails contributors
easier, and to improve the quality of our releases.

Our main tools are: Debian, Puppet, Git and Jenkins.

The most important, and larger pieces on our roadmap currently are:

* Continuous Integration: we want to drastically cut down the amount
  of work needed to prepare a Tails release; we also want to detect
  regressions as soon as possible. Everything we merge should go
  through an automated test suite, and our Debian packages should be
  automatically built from Git tags.

* Freezable APT repository: we need to freeze our APT repository when
  we freeze our release branch; this is also a first and important
  milestone on our way towards reproducible builds.

Exciting, uh? Needless to say, we also have plenty of smaller tasks on
our plate :)

How can I help?
===============

There are many ways to give us a hand in this area.
[[Read more about it|contribute/how/sysadmin]]!

<div class="note">

When getting in touch with us, please attach a patch, or your plans,
for a ticket marked *Easy*: this way, you can quickly get up to speed,
and we can get used to working together. Of course, if the ticket you
want to work on lacks the information you need to resolve it, don't
hesitate asking us for clarification first.

</div>
