Hi,

Unlike some people I believe that debbugs can be improved and modernized
in a satisfying way while retaining most if not all of its current
interfaces. This would minimize breakage and inconvenience for
developers that are mostly fine with the way it currently works.

I'm considering getting my hands into that thing later this year, so let
me try to summarize the relevant parts of the previous threads (with the
intent of documenting this in a wiki page).

We would like debbugs to:
0. keep all the e-mail features it currently offers
1. process new requests and give feedback instantly
2. hide e-mail addresses from public (unauthenticated) web browsing
3. have a web UI that makes it possible to submit bugs, reply to bugs, manipulate bugs
4. have some GitLab (Salsa) integration
5. have better, restructured, simplified documentation with full
examples
6. track merge requests.

Implementing 2. is likely to break habits and maybe some tools, as
currently there is no authentication at all on debbugs web UI and you
can use it to view full headers, download mboxes and generate a working
reply mailto: link. It also won't completely solve the privacy issue, as
e-mail addresses can also be found in git repositories and mailing list archives. IMO it would be better to recommend using a dedicated e-mail
address.

I took note of some existing previous work for 3. (MUMI, DebGTD) that is
worth looking at though I could not find anything about "the return of
the Amancay".

6. is not clear enough. What would we like debbugs to achieve, more
precisely, here?

BTW I don't think that Bugzilla, GitLab issues or even JIRA would be
suitable replacements for debbugs. FWIW some Apache projects including
the whole Maven project are now migrating away from JIRA to GitHub
issues, but they also have a fairly different usage pattern than Debian.
For Debian maybe something like Redmine could work (I'm not suggesting a change, but looking at alternatives may give some ideas).

Cheers,

--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène

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