There are probably thousands of LaTeX packages many of which are riddled with bugs and limitations. All these packages have an inherent need to interoperate and to be used together unlike any other software. Yet there are countless bizarre incompabilities. There are various situations where two different font packages cannot be used in the same document because of avoidable name clashes. If multiple different packages use a color package with different options, errors are triggered about clashing options when all the user did was simply use two unrelated packages.

Every user must do a dance with all these unknown bugs. Becoming proficient with LaTeX entails an exercise of working around bugs. Often the sequence of \usepackage makes the difference between compilation and failure, and the user must guess about which packages to reorder.

So there is a strong need for a robust comprehensive bug tracking system. Many of the packages have no bug tracker whatsoever. Many of those may even be unmaintained code. Every package developer uses the bug tracker of their choice (if they bother), which is often Microsoft Github’s walled garden of exclusion.

Debian has a disaster of its own w.r.t LaTeX

Debian bundles up the whole massive monolithic collection of LaTeX packages into a few texlive-* packages. If you find a bug in a pkg like csquotes, which maps to texlive-latex-extra and you report a bug in the Debian bug tracker for that package, the Debian maintainer is driven up the wall because one person has 100s/1000s of pkgs to manage.

It’s an interesting disaster because the Debian project has the very good principle that all bugs be reportable and transparent. Testers are guided to report bugs in the Debian bug tracker, not upstream. It’s the Debian pkg manager’s job to forward bugs upstream as needed. Rightly so, but there is also a reasonable live-and-let-live culture that tolerates volunteer maintainers using their own management style. So some will instruct users to directly file bugs upstream.

Apart from LaTeX, it’s a bit shitty because users should not be exposed to MS’s walled garden which amounts to bug supression. But I can also appreciate the LaTeX maintainer’s problem… it’d be virtually humanly unsurmountable for a Debian maintainer to take on such a workload.

What’s needed

  • Each developer of course needs control of their choice of git and bug tracker, however discriminatory the choice is – even if they choose to have no bug tracker at all.
  • Every user and tester needs a non-discriminatory non-controversial resource to report bugs on any and all LaTeX packages. They should not be forced to lick Microsoft’s boots (if MS even allows them).
  • Multiple trackers need a single point of review, so everyone can read bug reports in a single place.

Nothing exists that can do that. We need a quasi-federation of bug trackers giving multiple places to write bug reports and a centralised resource for reviewing bug reports. Even if a package is abandoned by a maintainer, it’s still useful for users to report bugs and discuss workarounds (in fact, more importantly so).

The LaTeX community needs to solve this problem. And when they do, it could solve problems for all FOSS not just LaTeX.

(why this is posted to !foss_requests@libretechni.ca: even though a whole infrastructure is needed, existing FOSS does not seem to satisfy it. Gitea is insufficient.)