cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/617678

The shitshow is largely described here. That’s LaTeX-focused, but the whole FOSS infra is a disaster.

We need an app that can harvest bug reports from multiple sources and build a local database that aggregates all bug reports. That is, it harvests bug reports in github, gnu.org, Salsa, as well as distro-specific reports (e.g. Ubuntu bug reports from launchpad and Debian bug reports from debian.org).

Rationale

• Dupe reports (due to lazy people)-- Some trigger-happy testers/users do not bother to lookup whether a bug is already reported. And most of the rest only check one db, not all.
• Dupe reports (by design)-- The Debian guidance is to report bugs to the Debian bug tracker (to some extent, even if the bug is already reported upstream). If not upstream, it’s the maintainer’s job to mirror it upstream. It’s a good policy but diligent testers who check multiple trackers see some distracting redundancy.
• Query limitations-- searching for bug reports is limited to the GUI search form for each DB, each of which is limited in different ways. Just let me fucking grep.
• Offline users fucked-- Bug DBs are naturally online, so air-gapped/offline users have no access to the bug DB. A local DB that can be sync’d from bug trackers when the user is momentarily online.
• Full searching-- a local copy of all bug tracker datasets enables testers to search all records with a single query.