Winding down my Debian involvement

I wonder if this has anything to do with the SJWs.

The Arch User Repository (https://aur.archlinux.org/) seems to solve a lot of the collaboration issues. It is pretty painless to create PKGBUILD files to make a package and to upload a new one to the AUR. Most maintainers read the comments and accept patches on a timely manner, and there's even a way to forcibly relinquish a package if a maintainer is AWOL for significant time.

On the other side of the spectrum, I've found that the official binary repositories for Arch Linux suffer many of the same issues described in the article for Debian. Patches being ignored and collaboration or involvement being near impossible. Even worse, the few people in charge of the official repositories are allowed to basically remove packages from the AUR with no interaction with the AUR maintainer, for the purpose of "promoting" them to the official repositories. This has happened to me twice, and it resulted in what I think is a worse package in one of those cases.

I love Debian as a user. I considered becoming a DM then DD -- I read all the relevant documents and tested water with maintaining a package I used -- but ultimately gave up due to the bureaucracy and politics involved.

The last straw was this: https://lwn.net/Articles/704608/

Likewise for the BSD ports.

There are advantages to both ways. However, a single repository permits changes to multiple packages in a single change. In Debian, simple transitions which affect multiple packages can take months or even years to fully propagate through the entire system. Not due to technical difficulty, but the logistics of coordinating the change.

Debian's approach made sense at the time. Developers who were widely distributed, communicating sporadically using dial-up internet connections, needed to be able to work independently and changes which had wide-ranging effects needed discussion and coordination. Nowadays, that can happen on a single merge request on GitLab. Homebrew can do such changes in a single pull request.

It's not just about "low quality" bug reports. The entire system is baroque and messy to use even for experts. I've been using it for 2+ decades now.

As a maintainer, I frequently needed to change bug tickets. Tags, versions, dependencies, and other details. All need doing through the control@ email interface. Changes can take over half an hour to be processed and acknowledged. It's inefficient and tedious, and prone to error if there's a single typo. While I'm not a fan of web interfaces, bugzilla, JIRA, gitlab issues etc. are all a world more effective and efficient to use.

The Debian BTS does what it does well. However, the other systems all do a much better job. The Debian BTS is a couple of decades past its prime. Nowadays we don't need email interfaces to services like this, we have much simpler and more immediate ways to talk to services, which are even easier to script for non-interactive use.

Take a typical interaction. I need to respond to a ticket I didn't originally file or get CC'd on. With any other system, I'd log in, find the ticket, make a comment and any metadata changes, and press "submit". With the Debian BTS, I need to find the ticket, download the mbox mailbox by hand and open that in a mail client by hand, then find and reply to the relevant message(s) and make any other needed changes using the control interface. It takes much longer, and it wastes huge quantities of valuable time. It is not a pleasure to use.

I can not understate what a huge time sink it is to use the Debian BTS to work with dozens of tickets every day. It's an exercise in frustration.