What started the discussion
There's been discussion on debian-devel recently about possibly adding a criterium for testing migration. Namely not letting packages migrate to testing if they heave bugs that are being completely ignored by the maintainer (as in not even an acknowledgement) for long periods of times (months, or even years for some bugs).
Why is this a problem?
- It leads to frustration on the part of the bug submitter:
I don't think this needs much explanation, but for those developpers not getting it. The problem is essentially the same as when ftpmaster being silent on why a package is stil stuck in new after <long period of time>.
- It disencourages people to get actively involved with Debian:
- Filing bugs is a easy (though minor) way of getting involved in Debian. If people have a bad experience when getting involved in minor ways, they are unlikely to spent effort getting more involved. We want people to get involved with Debian thus we want to make sure people have a good experience when they try to get involved.
Size of the problem:
- (Please help fill in this list)
- packages whose maintainers can't keep up with incoming bugs.
- packages with lots of antiquated bugs that need to be sorted out.
- KDE
- Iceweasel (300+ antiquated bugs to triage)
- Iceape (200+ antiquated bugs to triage)
- OpenSSH
- fixes for prospective architectures (almost all bugs have patches or fixing recipe)