Debian Working To Modernize Its Website, Rolls Out New Homepage

[baryluk]

Newsflash: a community of people build Debian. Debian needs to attract and retain people in order to continue building it. Pretty simple, isn't it?

If you are not one of those people — not everyone has the social skills necessary to be able to work with others, or understand alternate points of view — then you can ignore that part of the home page.

This is nonsense. To make Debian more attractive to builders and developers, they need to focus on things that are important to developers. Easier workflows, better and easier to use issue tracking, patches, easier contributions from non-developers, more automation for packaging new versions, etc. The new home page actually makes these things harder, and doesn't help with important stuff. I have hundredths of patches for various packages in Debian, and there is usually zero response from debian developers, and I can't do anything about it, other than wait.

Just take a look at other software development platforms, particularly gitlab and github, how easy it is to do things. It is usually just one click to merge requests, or send a proposal. Just take it step further, and have another one click button, so the patches / changes, just go automatically to build new packages, populate changelogs, increase version, etc. etc.

The mailing list approach is also super dated. Many mailing lists do have both human and automated traffic, which is very stupid. Both for developers, as well new comers, that want to interact with people, ask questions, or propose changes. To participate in the discussion, you need to subscribe, and then you are spamed with hundredths of machine generated nonsense messages every day.

The entire issue tracker, mailing lists, package tracker, package browser, QA pages, Salsa / gitlab stuff, build status pages, etc, require total overhaul and proper integration and coherence, not a lot of disparate systems.

[EarthMind]

A much needed facelift in my opinion. It has always been a PITA to find the downloads via their website

[damonlynch]

This is nonsense. To make Debian more attractive to builders and developers, they need to focus on things that are important to developers. Easier workflows, better and easier to use issue tracking, patches, easier contributions from non-developers, more automation for packaging new versions, etc. The new home page actually makes these things harder, and doesn't help with important stuff.

It's not either / or. Debian can have a better home page that emphasizes its community — without which there is no Debian — and it can improve its developer tools.

I don't understand the massive hostility to something as simple as a project talking about having a community of developers. Heck even the Microsoft employees leading Windows terminal development go out of their way to emphasize development community, and they're representing one of the richest corporations in the world. When a non-profit like Debian does it, it's triggering to some folks here. Go figure.

[Vistaus]

The most important thing that needs modernization is the Debian issue tracker. Right now it actually hinders people from reporting bugs or even from getting an overview of the state of a bug. Why not just use a GitLab instance or something like that?

I agree that their issue tracker is awful, but GitLab is just as unorganized in my daily experience with it. I like the idea behind GitLab, but it's too cluttered and unorganized for me, not to mention that my fans start spinning every time I open a GitLab page (GitHub does not suffer from the same issue).

[Vistaus]

I'm actually feeling some nostalgia for the old design and am in a way sad to see it go. It was refreshingly simple and old school. Free of the cruft of the modern web (though the new page is not too bad with respect to this either).

That said, the usability was less than stellar (especially on mobile). On the whole, it probably needed a replacement. And as direx said above, the bug tracker is catastrophic.

I like old-school, cruft-free websites too, but there's old-school and old-school. Debian's website was okay, but not great. There are far better old-school websites (still) around.

[baryluk]

I agree that their issue tracker is awful, but GitLab is just as unorganized in my daily experience with it. I like the idea behind GitLab, but it's too cluttered and unorganized for me, not to mention that my fans start spinning every time I open a GitLab page (GitHub does not suffer from the same issue).

Just using GitLab would not work for Debian. I don't think GitLab can be setup to handle so many sub-projects, and make it organized, etc. It is fixable probably, but I don't think in the current state GitLab can replace BTS for Debian.

[DKJones]

Hell just froze over.

[cmsigler]

Well, if I were them, I would spend more time improving the wiki

Why? Most every quick web search will lead to an ArchWiki article anyway (Or Gentoo Wiki)

[zxy_thf]

I agree that their issue tracker is awful, but GitLab is just as unorganized in my daily experience with it. I like the idea behind GitLab, but it's too cluttered and unorganized for me, not to mention that my fans start spinning every time I open a GitLab page (GitHub does not suffer from the same issue).

sourcehut can be a good alternative to GitLab. It's still in alpha, but consider the time required to migrate the whole community I think it's viable to evaluate this solution right now.

[reavertm]

Gitlab has too rudimentary issue tracker to be used by any major Linux distribution internally, seeing how many custom workflows we have implemented in Gentoo in Bugzilla. Gitlab issue tracker is only suitable for "customer reports/requests" at best.