Package: qa.debian.org Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-Cc: debbug....@sideload.33mail.com
Control: affects -1 +www.debian.org When a bug report is mishandled there should be a documented procedure in place by which the mishandling can be reported to the Debian QA team. There should be metrics in place to make it easy to look for patterns of bug mishandling. And there should be some oversight so a QA member can intervene on specific bugs if a constructive action can be taken. Currently there is no such procedure (or I failed to find it). I expected to find it in these locations: https://wiki.debian.org/BTS https://www.debian.org/Bugs Debian bugs are mishandled too often, which suggests there is no oversight of mishandled cases. I have an example at hand: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1026922 A valid, credible bug report was tagged “wontfix”, which in itself is often fair enough but in this case the action /should/ have been to mirror the bug report upstream because upstream is the source of the bug. “wontfix” would only be sensible if the source of the bug was in the debian pkging & the Debian maintainer opts not to fix it in Debian. A possible secondary mishandling of that bug was early archival as a means of suppression: “Bug archived. Request was from Debbugs Internal Request <ow...@bugs.debian.org> to internal_cont...@bugs.debian.org. (Sat, 04 Mar 2023 07:26:51 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).” Whether an intervention on bug 1026922 is a good move or not doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’d be over-the-top. But regardless, there should be some record of the mishandling so if a pattern develops it can be noticed & acted on summarily. Or at least users could use bug mishandling stats to appraise the quality of a package before deciding to depend on it.
