Comment by csnover
2 days ago
As someone who uses Debian and very occasionally interacts with the BTS, what I can say is this:
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.
> 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.
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.
The command is `bts` in devscripts. I wrote it in 2001.
The spam issue is probably one of the stronger arguments against email centered design for bug trackers, code forges and the like. It's a bit crazy that in order to professionally participate in modern software development, you're inherently agreeing that every spammer with a bridge to sell you is going to be able to send you unsollicited spam.
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.