Re: Migrating to the latest Debbugs version

[Felix Lechner]

Hi Eli,

On Mon, Jan 15 2024, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> what this means in practice for us the users of debbugs

My goal is to keep things unchanged for now. The primary goal is to make
Debbugs maintainable once again.

GNU Guix is a functional, declarative package manager. It will make
tools like Ansible and Puppet obsolete.

For your perusal, I attached the current packaging for debbugs-gnu
below.

> should we expect any changes in the HMI or UX

No changes should happen when we migrate from Debian with a manually
maintained code base to a repo-tracked deployment [1] on GNU Guix.

When we upgrade to the newest version of Debbugs, we will see whatever
changes upstream made in the past fifteen years.

[1] https://codeberg.org/lechner/debbugs-gnu

> What about the directives accepted by control@debbugs.gnu.org

I do not know which changes upstream made in the past fifteen years, if
any. My sense---from having used the GNU instance for two years and the
Debian instance thousands of times since 1997---is that the control
commands stayed more or less the same.

Are you worried about something in particular?

> any expected changes from this migration on the user level?

This migration has three overarching goals.

1. Make Debbugs maintainable again
2. Encourage contributions
3. Upgrade to the latest upstream version

After a broad consensus among users, we could potentially fork. We would
then rewrite the bug tracker in Scheme.

The goal would be to attract contributions from the user base at the
Emacs and GNU Guix projects, who love the Lambda calculus. We would also
try to save the Email-based workflow for patch contributions for GNU
projects that might otherwise switch to collaborative, web-based forges.

Kind regards
Felix