[[!meta title="Relationship with upstream"]]

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# Why this document?

The Debian Derivatives Guidelines ([[!debwiki Derivatives/Guidelines]])
encourages "derivative distributions to
mention and define their relationship with Debian". Because this seems
like a great idea to us, we wrote this statement that not only covers
Tails' relationship with Debian, but also Tails' relationship with any
one of its upstream projects.

# Summary

For various reasons Tails tries to diverge by the smallest possible
amount from its upstream projects, and especially from Debian:

- We want to share our work with the rest of the Free Software
  community.
- We value maintainability very much: we believe our users are best
  served if we keep the amount of work needed to maintain Tails the
  smallest possible.

# How

## Upstream software

We try to push our changes upstream when we need to modify software we
ship. This often requires us to write code in a generic way, rather
than implementing ad-hoc hacks to fit our specific needs: e.g. we
often need to make the stuff we need opt-in and add configuration
options.

## Debian packaging

Debian offers great amounts of flexibility to derivative developers,
so we seldom need to modify Debian-specific parts of the software we
ship. In the rare cases we need to:

- we at least inform the relevant Debian maintainers, so that they
  have a chance to enhance their packages to fit our needs;
- in many cases, we write and propose patches that would allow us to
  install unmodified Debian packages in Tails.

We also encourage potential contributors to [[improve Tails by working
on Debian|contribute/how/debian]].

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### Debian Bug tracking system

We file and contribute to RFP and WNPP bugs so that software we need
lands in Debian. More generally, we heavily use the Debian
infrastructure such as the [BTS](https://bugs.debian.org/).

We use usertags ([documentation](https://wiki.debian.org/bugs.debian.org/usertags),
[reporting](https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting)) to track bugs we
are interested in on the Debian BTS.

See the full and up-to-date list of bugs:

* [sorted by usertag](https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=tails-dev@boum.org);
* [sorted by severity](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=tails-dev@boum.org).

**Warning**: do **not** use tags that are already [defined
globally](https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#tags) on the BTS.

## Build tools

We contribute to [Debian Live](http://live.debian.net/) on a regular
basis. Every single feature we have added to Debian Live has been
merged upstream, and we intend to go on this way.

<a id="gnome-bts"></a>

## GNOME

See the [tickets that affect Tails in the GNOME bug tracker](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=AffectsTails&list_id=141377&order=bug_id&query_based_on=&query_format=advanced).
