Debian's use of debbugs (was Re: On Contributing To Emacs)

[Sean Whitton]

Hello Stefan,

On Sat 01 Jan 2022 at 12:38pm -05, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> Not really -- we can't really quit debbugs because it has special
>> features to track how we do versions and releases, and we are highly
>> reliant on those.
>
> That's news to me.  Could you give details of what you mean?

It's mostly about how we automate migrating packages from our 'unstable'
distribution to the 'testing' distribution, and the process of
automatically dropping buggy packages from 'testing' in order to allow
other packages to migrate.  We can specify particular version numbers of
packages in which a bug is present or absent, and debbugs looks at the
versions in 'unstable' and 'testing' and figures out where the bug is
present and draws a graph, which is very helpful when triaging.

There are also some tags to override this logic -- for example, perhaps
the same version of the package is in 'unstable' and 'testing', but the
bug only occurs in 'testing'.  If the bug is properly tagged, the
testing migration tool can determine what other packages it might be
able to migrate unstable->testing if it were to remove the buggy package
from 'testing', and things like that.

I don't work much in release-related parts of Debian, so I am not sure
how much of the logic is on the debbugs side and how much is in the
testing migration scripts, but there's certainly some in both.  As a
package maintainer, you just try to set the correct debbugs metadata and
package dependency metadata, and the scripts are able to figure out good
migration solutions.

-- 
Sean Whitton