Perspectives on bugs in the Debian bug tracking system

Abstract

Bugs in Debian differ from regular software bugs. They are usually associated with packages, instead of software modules. They are caused and fixed by source package uploads instead of code commits. The majority are reported by individuals who appear in the bug database once, and only once. There also exists a small group of bug reporters with over 1,000 bug reports each to their name. We also explore our idea that a high bug-frequency for an individual package might be an indicator of popularity instead of poor quality.