Sometimes, it is nearly as frustrating to use Debian than it is to use commercial software. For example, when one sees a simple bug completely unreacted on for more than one year. #405040 has passed its first anniversary since it was reported and touched for the last time. Visible reaction of the package maintainer: Nil.
It's a small thing, but an annoying one. And I still consider it unacceptable to let bugs rot for a year without the slightest trace of action.
The last days, Debian suffered a bug in the reportbug package which made it fail in postinst. This bug was promptly fixed, but reported like THIRTEEN times as a bug in the BTS. If I were reportbug maintainer, I'd have gone ballistic at this ignorance of bug reporters.
Guys, all of you who have reported this bug are running Debian unstable, an unreleased development version of your distribution. Is it asking too much to follow basic etiquette to look in the BTS whether a fatal bug might already been reported? I mean, THIRTEEN nearly identical reports?
Vor einem Monat hat ajt Usertags und User Categories angekündigt.
Damit wird die Behandlung komplexer Packages im BTS einfacher, weil man eigene Struktur in die Bugreports bringen kann. Hoffentlich reicht das Featureset, um meine unabhängig vom BTS im Debian Wiki geführten Webseiten zur Bugklassifikation in die Tonne treten zu können. Die Zeit wird das zeigen.
The Debian BTS has recently learned to track versions. Bugs can be closed and "found" for certain package versions, so that it is easier now to determine whether a bug is present in a distribution or not. However, Colin still needs to write a "metric shitload of documentation", and I still fall way short of understanding how to use the feature.
Continue reading "Debian BTS with version tracking"