On Thu, May 22, 2025 at 10:54:21AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote: > On Thu, May 22, 2025 at 09:53:10AM +0200, Jérémy Lal wrote: > > What would help is a web ui built on top of debbugs, and made available to > > anyone, > > possibly by adding another link next to tracker.d.o bugs link. > > That noone has done this yet is a sign for me that we don't actually need it > so urgently. I think the distribution has more pressing things to solve.
Respectfully, there are two additional logical flaws in your argument: The first one is an either/or fallacy, also known as a false dichotomy. Noone is asking to choose between solving this problem and other (more pressing or not) problems. While we have a finite pool of people and resources, these are not interchangeable. The people potentially interested in solving this problem are not necessarily interested in solving the problems that you consider pressing, and vice-versa. These are not competing priorities. The second one is of survirorship (and, secondarily, selection) bias: the people that are already involved in Debian have "survived" by either liking, not minding, or -at minimum- not being driven away by the use of our bug tracking system. In other words, One of the possible explanations of why noone has done this already, and that we need to consider, is that noone in the _existing_ contributor base is sufficiently annoyed to be motivated to fix this for themselves, while at the same time no new (sufficiently annoyed) contributor would be able to start their contributions to Debian by changing such a fundamental piece of our infrastructure (nor would they be welcomed to). What is being presented here by the OP is an argument with regards to outreach and attraction of new contributors. Therefore, to sufficiently demonstrate that this is indeed not a valid argument, one would need by extension to argue one or more of these, IMHO: a) The user-friendliness of our BTS has no significant impact in us attracting new contributors; b) The goal of tailoring the BTS to new contributors is competing with the goal of retaining existing contributors and the costs outweight the benefits; c) We are already good at attracting new contributors; d) We are not really interested in new contributors, we're good as it is. (I have not been thinking this for long and may be missing other options -- let me know if you can think more.) To the crux of the matter, I personally disagree with (a), (c), and (d), and hope you do too. I believe the core of your argument earlier in the thread was (b). With regards to that, I personally remain hopeful that we can lower the barrier-to-entry while keeping what works for us, but I am interested to hear more perspectives of why this is sufficiently hard to not pursue, or even contemplate discussing. Regards, Faidon
