Changes applied with early_patch are ineffective for the Unsafe Browser

intrigeri
2024-08-13T16:38:43Z

That's because it uses a chroot based on filesystem.squashfs, rather than on the live root filesystem that one would typically modify with their early_patch hook.

Fixing this is not trivial:

An earlier implementation (3891cc71) was reverted in !1610 (merged) because it was not compatible with merged-/usr being applied in the running Tails, but not in our source tree; this broke things in ways that took time to figure out (#20395 (closed)).

Applying merged-/usr to our source tree would make that earlier implementation work again, but it would make our Git history harder to inspect. Some of the problems can be mitigated. See !1537 (closed).

A simpler workaround (!1570 (closed)) turned out not to work that easily and would require more work than we think this issue is worth.