Posted by all-along 1 day ago
The longer answer is that a lot of people already use Git for Debian version control, and the article expands on how this will be better-integrated in the future. But what goes into the archive (for building) is fundamentally just a source package with a version number. There's a changelog, but you're free to lie in it if you so wish.
After I left that company I ended up at a larger company (~14k employees) in part because I'd worked on SVN-to-Git migrations before. Definitely a different beast, since there were a huge amount of workflows that needed changing, importing 10 years of SVN history (some of which used to be CVS history), pruning out VM images and ISOs that had been inadvertently added, rewriting tons of code in their Jenkins instance, etc.
All this on top of installing, configuring, and managing a geographically distributed internal Gitlab instance with multiple repositories in the tens or hundreds of gigabytes.
It was a heck of a ride and took years, but it was a lot of fun at the same time. Thankfully 'the guy who suggested the transition' was the CEO (in the first company) or CTO (in the second) nothing went wrong, no one got thrown under buses, and both companies are still doing a-okay (as far as source control goes).
Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/927/
Sincere question. I haven't interacted with it much in ages.
1. Send an empty email to a special address for the bug.
2. Wait 15-30 minutes for Debian's graylisting mail server to accept your email and reply with a confirmation email.
3. Reply to the confirmation email.
The last time I tried to follow a bug, I never got the confirmation email.
In practically every other bug tracker, following a bug is just pressing a button.
Like most of Debian's developer tooling, the bug tracker gets the job done (most of the time) but it's many times more inconvenient than it needs to be.
Also the hoop can be as simple as "click here to sign in with <other account you already have>".
As far as I know, it is impossible to use the BTS without getting spammed, because the only way to interact with it is via email, and every interaction with the BTS is published without redaction on the web. So, if you ever hope to receive updates, or want to monitor a bug, you are also going to get spam.
Again, because of the email-only design, one must memorise commands or reference a text file to take actions on bugs. This may be decent for power users but it’s a horrible UX for most people. I can only assume that there is some analogue to the `bugreport` command I don’t know of for maintainers that actually offers some amount of UI assistance. As a user, I have no idea how to close my own bugs, or even to know which bugs I’ve created, so the burden falls entirely on the package maintainers to do all the work of keeping the bug tracker tidy (something that developers famously love to do…).
The search/bug view also does not work particularly well in my experience. The way that bugs are organised is totally unintuitive if you don’t already understand how it works. Part of this is a more general issue for all distributions of “which package is actually responsible for this bug?”, but Debian BTS is uniquely bad in my experience. It shows a combination of status and priority states and uses confusing symbols like “(frowning face which HN does not allow)” and “=” and “i” where you have to look at the tooltip just to know what the fuck that means.
There's a reason most code forges offer you a fake email that will also be considered as "your identity" for the forge these days.
Do the emails from the BTS come from a consistent source? If so, it's not a good solution, but you could sign up with a unique alias that blackholes anything that isn't from the BTS.
Also, locally patching reportbug to support XDG base directory spec is a chore (since maintainers didn't accept the fix for it for years).
so kudos to its authors