[GTALUG] Pain points in debian release process.

[Alex Volkov]

Hello everyone,

I've stumbled upon this article describing all the issues that make the 
process of bugfixes and package releases cumbersome in Debian.

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/

I've always been interested in contributing to Debian, but just learning 
the process of maintaining a package seem to be complex enough that I 
would postpone so I would have more time to look at this -- which I 
never really had.

I've looked at this uncritically as just a matter of remembering and 
following the process, but the article above seems to describe all the 
issues that are in fact make the process cumbersome and difficult for 
the beginners.

A few sticking points for me personally were configuring reportbug tool 
-- as the only way to submit bug reports is via email, so in addition to 
trying to describe the problem, I also need to configure mailing system, 
and I'm a technical person who knows this (and I have configured own 
mail server), so I'd imagine someone whose found some issue and for 
example is using gmail web interface would be completely lost.

I like debian bug tracking system for looking up bugs, but submitting a 
bug seemed like a huge pain.

Debian recently switched to Gitlab as their repository manager, but the 
article points out that all bug tracking management is still would be 
done using old and cumbersome tool.

I'm writing this email not to start a flamewar about Debian, as I've 
been using it for more than 10 years and I'm pretty happy about the 
distribution, but I now I believe that the best way to become Debian 
contributor is to go to a Bug Squashing Party where someone could 
navigate a novice through a particular set of tools used for the release 
of a particular package.

Alex.