Interesting learnings about Guix contributor dynamics that apply to Debian?
Hi!
I came across this post https://issues.guix.gnu.org/76503 in Guix
where they discuss how to improve the contributor experience, and in
particular what technical changes they are doing.
Guix is interesting as they use a clone of Debbugs as their bug
tracker at https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=guix.
Apparently they too noticed that the UI is lacking to say the least,
and they created MUMI to use as an additional view into Debbugs. This
can be seen in action in https://issues.guix.gnu.org/ with docs at
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Debbugs-User-Interfaces.html
Now they decided to ditch Debbugs completely and replace email-only
workflow with using Codeberg (Forgejo). I am not saying Debian should
do this, or replace Debbugs with Salsa issues. We don't even develop
using a monorepo so the solutions don't apply 1:1. But there are a lot
of similarities and e.g.
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-3/
are interesting to read as an in-depth analysis of how to attract and
retain contributors. It will be interesting to see how the move away
from Debbugs affects contributor activity and quality in Guix going
forward.
Debian has certainly done many things right in the past 30 years, but
treatment of new contributors is currently pretty harsh, considering
how many cracks and false turns they need to overcome on to become
regular contributors.
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