Methods of accessing the bug tracking system logs

Accessing active bug reports

Each message received at or sent by the bug processing system is logged and made available in a number of ways.

The primary access method is to use the web pages. See the forms on the main BTS page at http://bugs.debian.org/

There is a mailserver which can send bug reports as plain text on request. To use it send the word help as the sole contents of an email to request@bugs.debian.org (the Subject of the message is ignored), or read the instructions on the World Wide Web or in the file bug-log-mailserver.txt.

Accessing archived bug reports

Each closed bug report is archived 28 days after the last message relating to it is received and filed. This means that it is no longer possible to access it or change anything about it using the control and service bots. However, the reports are still accessible for viewing.

You can search the bug report archive using the WWW forms at http://bugs.debian.org/, simply select the archived bugs option.

Note that it doesn't contain the oldest closed bug reports, only those after #40000, approximately.

Accessing the raw bug data

If you need to get hold of the raw data used by the bug tracking system, you can mirror it using rsync from bugs-mirror.debian.org. The relevant modules are bts-spool-db (for the active bug spool), bts-spool-archive (for bugs that have been closed for a while and thus archived), and bts-spool-index (for the bug index files).

At the time of writing, the active spool is about 2.5GB and the archived spool is about 10GB. If you only need a sample for testing purposes, please consider downloading only part of the active spool rather than the whole thing.

Please do not rely on *.status files in the bug spools, as they are obsolete, for compatibility purposes only, and will be removed at some point in the future. Use the *.summary files instead.