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Orphaning reportbug-ng

After more than two years without an update, I’ve decided to discontinue developing reportbug-ng and orphaned the Debian package. Since reportbug is a more than adequate alternative and reportbug-ng’s popcon value is relatively low, it’s probably the best to just remove the package from the archive.

I started developing reportbug-ng 11 years ago as a user-friendly alternative to Debian’s standard reportbug. Not only did it come with a nice GUI that allowed for easy searching and filtering of existing bugs, it also queried our bug tracking system (BTS) using its SOAP interface. Back then, reportbug used to parse the human readable HTML from the website to get the same information.

A couple of years later Debian’s reportbug got a GUI too and became a lot more novice-friendly.

At some point I asked the reportbug team if they’d be interested in moving away from parsing the BTS’ HTML and using the SOAP interface too. They agreed and I started separating the BTS related part of the code into a separate Python module called python-debianbts. A few years later, in August 2011, reportbug 6.0 started to use python-debianbts for querying the BTS.

It has been a fun ride, but it’s time to acknowledge that reportbug-ng has outlived its usefulness and I’m not willing to maintain that Qt based GUI anymore. I still continue to maintain python-debianbts, though.