A (Partial) Defense of Debian

Writing about Debian’s bug-tracking tool, Michael says “It is great to have a paper-trail and artifacts of the process in the form of a bug report, but the primary interface should be more convenient (e.g. a web form).” And it’s designed to push people into using their tools and their interface, which is inferior in a lot of ways to a local interface – but then the process to pull down someone else’s set of patches involves a lot of typing and clicking, much more that would be involved from a simple git format-patch. Debian could do more to offer concise guides for drive-by contributions and the building of packages that follow standard language community patterns, both of which can be done without much knowledge of packaging tools and inner workings of the project.

Source: changelog.complete.org