Since several people seem to be sharing their experiences with (undesirable) challenges in becoming a DD, I thought I'd add a point that seemingly hasn't been covered yet:
The BTS is core to Debian. It is e-mail based. While I personally think e-mail-based workflows can be quite nice, the BTS' asynchronous nature did cause me a lot of extra pointless work when I was an outsider attempting to learn the ropes. Being not 100% confident with the system, I way too often found myself waiting minutes – as much as 10 or 15 – for replies to simple operations. Not only because being assigned a bug number is actually necessary in order to move on with some processes like initial packaging, but also because of the mental toll that comes from not knowing that a past operation successfully completed, and worrying that I'd have to return to it. Admittedly, I still feel like that at times, some six years later (a DD for four). I suspect that this highly asynchronous nature of the BTS significantly puts off new contributors. This is not meant as an argument against e-mail based systems (although I do suspect that that is also a hindrance to some new contributors). Nor is it meant to suggest that we need to embrace instant gratification. We certainly should not – but it is not unreasonable to expect to be able to see a syntax error in bug report modification without waiting ten minutes. Just my 0.1 monetary units. Best, Gard
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