A dispute has flared up inside the Debian project after a veteran maintainer criticized the Debian’s bug tracking system as outdated and increasingly unworkable for modern software development. The comments, made by Meson build system creator and Debian maintainer Jussi Pakkanen on December 22, argue that Debian’s reliance on email-based bug control is actively discouraging contributors and leaving bugs poorly maintained.
Pakkanen, who maintains Meson packages in Debian, said the project’s Bug Tracking System still requires developers to manage bug states by sending specially formatted emails to control addresses. While Debian provides a web interface for viewing bugs, actions such as closing, reassigning, or adjusting severity are typically performed via email commands rather than through a modern authenticated web UI.
“Using an email client as the only way of modifying bugs… is not only a bad idea, it is [a] terrible idea. To me managing bugs is so awful that it is actively pushing me away from contributing to Debian. The bug statuses on Meson are not kept up to date because I prefer that to having to deal with the bug tracker. I suspect I am not alone in this,” he said.
Requests for a full-featured web-based interface to manage Debian bugs are not new. Debian’s own bug tracker archives show that similar proposals date back to 2000, with some marked as “wontfix” on the grounds that email-based control was sufficient and more resilient.
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