Check your PTS subscriptions with UDD!

Posted on by lucas

The Debian Packages Tracking System has a great feature: you can subscribe to packages that matter to you, and be informed of all uploads, bugs, testing migrations, etc.

However, when (co-)maintaining a lot of packages, it is easy to forget to subscribe. And then you might miss important information about your packages (uploaders don’t receive bugmail by default, for example).

Since PTS subscriptions are now imported into Ultimate Debian Database, it is easy to find out if you missed some subscriptions. It’s just a matter of going to http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/pts-check.cgi and entering your email!

And for those concerned with privacy, it should be noted that the unauthenticated access to UDD only gives you the hash of the subscribers’ emails. You need to be a DD, and use the guestdd account to see the email addresses (which DDs can already see on master.d.o).

12 thoughts on “Check your PTS subscriptions with UDD!”

  1. Thank you for this one. But what would be even more awesome would be a method to see all regular bugs I’ve subscribed too. There’s already a DebBug for this: #362710

    Best regards, Thomas

  2. There is more to be concerned about privacy than “hashing” the email addresses. This is not about exposing addresses to harvesters, this is about patterns. You are publishing non-public informations publicly. It doesn’t take much to look up email addresses of others from people that one might be interested in. Before your interface this information wasn’t available to the public.

    Please remove it, I object to this exposure of (my) private data and please discuss publishing private data next time before doing so.

  3. @Thomas: The BTS is quite hard to gather data from, and I’m not sure how this information is stored.

    @Gerfried: the only information that is made available by this web interface is the list of packages that you maintain or upload, and are not subscribed to.

  4. Dear Lucas, I know what that information is. Let me emphasis: *I* know that. Still it is information that was only available through private means before, and that for a reason. Your case is not very much different to the information exposure that was available through the debian.net zone page, which got removed again.

    Even though this is “the only information that is made available” it is not *your* job to judge wether others might be happy with that. It wasn’t public before, people did subscribe through the PTS on that grounds. Please respect that. Thanks.

    Again, I object to have that information exposed like that – even if it’s more because of principle than anything else. You can’t go and decide for others what you you want to expose about them, especially way after this thing has been put in place and is known to not expose its data.

  5. Please raise the topic on a mailing list if you care that much. You have been the only one to object so far for this version of the cgi (an earlier version exposed more information, but it was changed).

  7. @Alexander: “so far” means “at the time of writing that comment, he was the only one to have objected”.

  9. It seems like it is not working, maybe you could add “Trying fixing privacies issues” or similar in the site.

    I would like to know which bugs I’m subscribed :)

    Thanks for your community work

  11. Sorry, I was thinking about users suscriptions :(

    It would be awesome if anyone fix the bug commented in #1

    Thank you again

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