Debugging a problem over email/irc/BTS is slow, tedious, and hard. The developer needs to see the your problem to understand it. Debug-me aims to make debugging fast, fun, and easy, by letting the developer access your computer remotely, so they can immediately see and interact with the problem. Making your problem their problem gets it fixed fast. As Simon Tatham puts it, "In a nutshell, the aim of a bug report is to enable the programmer to see the program failing in front of them." debug-me does just that!

A debug-me session is logged and signed with the developer's GnuPG key, producing a chain of evidence of what they saw and what they did. So the developer's good reputation is leveraged to make debug-me secure. If you trust a developer to ship software to your computer, you can trust them to debug-me.

When you start debug-me without any options, it will connect to a debug-me server, and print out an url that you can give to the developer to get them connected to you. Then debug-me will show you their GnuPG key, who has signed it, and will let you know if they are a known developer of software on your computer. If the developer has a good reputation, you can proceed to let them type into your console in a debug-me session. Once the session is done, the debug-me server will email you the signed evidence of what the developer did in the session.

If the developer did do something bad, you'd have proof that they cannot be trusted, which you can share with the world. Knowing that is the case will keep developers honest.

Debug-me is free software, created by Joey Hess and licensed under the terms of the Gnu AGPL version 3 or greater.