[rwmj]

The bug tracker is objectively awful. It takes 15+ minutes to subscribe to a bug, which is ridiculous! Absolutely no one would write a bug tracker today where everything is processed by email[1].

[1] Which is not to say that messaging is bad - a web interface with a proper message queue behind it would be fine. In fact that's how Fedora's systems work. It's that email is not a reasonable messaging system for this purpose.

[rleigh]

Tell me about it. Doing bulk updates to dozens of bugs as a routine daily activity was an exercise in masochism. As for making comments on existing bugs, you had to manually download the mbox archive just to make sure the right recipients were copied in.

It was pretty neat in 1998. Today, it's long eclipsed by pretty much everything else.

If I were Debian, I'd migrate the whole lot over to GitLab issues seeing as they have the infrastructure for it set up (salsa). The problem is there is a very vocal minority who still think it's not only good, but the best choice for Debian. I doubt the silent majority who suffer it agree. Like anything, it's an entrenched part of Debian culture that's hard to change. But it was time to retire it over a decade back.