Is gdebi still necessary?

Ultimately, somebody does have to do this sort of grunt work. Asking contributors to help with it is not IMHO inherently unreasonable, because otherwise you end up in the https://xkcd.com/2347/ situation.

But contributors do need to be aware that "no" is a valid answer. Here are some of the more reasonable "no"s I can think of:

* "No, because it's easier for me to carry the patch myself rather than do all the work you're asking for."
* "No, because I didn't even write this code, I'm just doing archaeology from our internal repository and found this patch, you can take it or leave it."
* "No, because I don't know how to do any of that work."
* "No, because I've decided that this patch is no longer worth it."
* "No, because my employer won't give me headcount for this sort of work, I've already tried talking to them, and they've insisted that I have to throw patches over the wall with no further work allowed." (This is reasonable on the part of the employee, not the employer.)

In an ideal world, contributors would avoid saying "no, because I don't feel like it," but ultimately everyone does have the right to decide what to spend their time on. Professional FOSS can be a bit of a mixed bag, because most tech companies do actually want testing etc. to get done, they just don't want to do it themselves. It's a fairly standard free-rider problem. Assuming we don't want government regulation (requiring tech companies to contribute headcount to FOSS they use), the next best option is probably a professional organization that hires developers for the good of the project, and is voluntarily supported by tech companies that rely on it. But you can really only do that for huge projects. We need a better solution for the small projects (better than "some person in Nebraska," at least).