I got convinced to hold an IRC talk on usage of the Debian BTS in #ubuntu-classroom and thought it might be interested to other children distributions of Debian, too—also for regular Debian users. So feel invited to attend it.
It will be held in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net on Thursday, 22nd of July, at 18:00 UTC. For those who have never attended such a session yet, you might want/need to also join #ubuntu-classroom-chat too and raise questions in there, the main channel will be set to moderated.
I will try to cover basic usage like querying the web interface, reporting new bugs and also more deeper handling of bugs, including version tracking issues, and will try to address raised questions as good as possible.
Hope the session will be helpful to some and be able to address some questions like why some bugs aren't getting archived even though they are closed for ages. :) IRC logs will be available for the convenience of those who can't make it.
Working on and for Debian for the whole millennium already it would had been hard to not notice Ubuntu through the times. Given that fixing bugs in the package is in the interest of all involved parties I started to get curious for the packages I maintain in Debian what users of Ubuntu might have filed against them. Given that a fair amount of those actually do also apply to Debian I started to fix them too.
Though, some bug status isn't able to use as an outsider, and given my approach to perfection not wanting to have packages in a bad shape in a release I started to dig a bit further into the procedures and applied to be accepted as a Ubuntu Developer, more specifically as a MOTU, which gives me the possibility to directly ask for syncrequest instead of having to go through a sponsor, or set wontfix status for bugreports in my packages that simply doesn't make sense to get implemented.
Last week I got accepted into that state and I'd like to thank for all the nice and encouraging feedback along the path (including some "What? I thought you were MOTU since ages already??" responses). Let's see how much I really need it, my approach is rather to reduce Ubuntu diffs instead of having to work on them. I though understand that at times close to the releases there can be a need for them, as can be seen in that the package I have to put most effort into (wesnoth-1.8) has a Ubuntu diff in the last lucid release. And because Ubuntu already is in DebianImportFreeze I did a syncrequest for gitolite.
Thanks for accepting me so quickly and rather bureaucratic! And no, Laney, I won't give the talk tomorrow because of this just on my own. ;)