DEBFTBFS(1)

💅 NAME 💅

debftbfs — the girlies who list every package that has FTBFS bugs filed against it. periodt.

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so bestie, here's the whole vibe. the usage is literally this:

debftbfs [-h] [-d] [-v]
   [--distribution {stable,testing,unstable,experimental}]
   [--source {auto,udd-mirror.d.n,udd.d.o,bugs.d.o}]

She goes and queries udd or bugs.debian.org and pulls you back all the source packages that currently have FTBFS bugs filed against them, for whatever distribution you asked for (default: unstable), and only in "main". no cap. 🫶

Now, the source-of-truth tea: if the psql utility is installed, she'll query the data from udd-mirror.debian.net. Otherwise it comes from udd.debian.org. Querying the mirror is a bit faster but the data might not be 100% up to date — it's giving slightly-stale-but-speedy. 😌

The result that comes back is a line-based list of source package names, their FTBFS bug, and the bug title, each separated by a space. Iconic, honestly.

Only bugs tagged 'ftbfs' and with a severity greater or equal to 'serious' are selected. and the whole thing is sorted by source package name, alphabetically ascending. as it should be. 💅

There are three available data sources and they all differ in how fast it is to retrieve the data, how up-to-date the data is, and in the chosen heuristic used to decide which ftbfs bugs affect which source package in a given distribution. Let's break it down:

• The two fastest data sources are udd-mirror.debian.net and udd.debian.org — with the former being around 20% faster than the latter — but either one finishes in under a second. lowkey magical ngl ✨
• The former will be more outdated than the latter though, because it is only a mirror. 🙈
• The slowest method is directly querying bugs.debian.org via its SOAP interface. 💀
• Querying bugs.debian.org will retrieve the most up-to-date information, but the heuristics chosen to decide whether a source package is affected by an ftbfs bug slightly differs from the heuristic used by udd. Differences mostly occur for bugs that were re-assigned to different source packages, or that have otherwise missing or incorrect metadata stored. 🎀

🦋 options: 🦋

• -h, --help — show this help message and exit. the classic. the icon. 👑
• -d, --debug — enable output of debugging messages. for when you simply must know everything. 🔍
• -v, --verbose — print verbose output. she'll talk more. we love that for her. 💬
• --distribution {stable,testing,unstable,experimental} — pick the distribution affected by the FTBFS issue. choose your fighter. 🌈
• --source {auto,udd-mirror.d.n,udd.d.o,bugs.d.o} — choose the UDD source between udd-mirror.debian.net, udd.debian.org, and bugs.debian.org. main character energy only. 🌸

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and that's the whole page bestie, we ate and left no crumbs 🍓. this was debftbfs 2.26.11ubuntu1, dated September 2026 — iykyk, see you in the next one 💜🦋