Hello all,
Last Saturday I attended to the Canonical Conference that is taking place at
Mataró.
This message is to talk about the Saturday Workshop and my impressions about
Canonical/Ubuntu and the Custom Debian Distributions.
About the Workshop, there are summaries of the three sessions available on
the Ubuntu wiki:
- http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/ManagingDerivedDistros
- http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SupportingTranslations
- http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/CollaborationAndConvergence
They introduced three tools that will be available soon to the public:
- Malone: a bug tracking systems aggregator that will let anyone track all
the bugs reported to a package in different distributions and bug tracking
systems.
- Rossetta: a web tool to help software translators.
- Soyuz: a control version system that will allow anyone track changes and
patches to a package in multiple distributions.
Let me say that Canonical is doing a lot of interesting things and that,
from the demos I've seen, I believe that all of them will be useful for
Debian and the Free Software Community as a whole.
Now, talking from the CDD point of view, I have to say that they are using a
different paradigm to customize their distribution; if they want to customize
something they patch and rebuild the source package.
This is so because they are working at the package source level; Ubuntu is a
Derived Distribution and one of it's goals is to have bleeding edge programs
(like the latest GNOME desktop) that are not in Debian, so they need to
update, patch and recompile a lot of packages anyway.
In summary, they are not against the CDD model (in fact they are interested
in making the system more customizable), but they are working with a
different model and currently they are not going to work on ours (well, a
lot of their work will benefit us and in fact they already directed people
interested on an approach like ours to the debian-custom list, so they are
helping us anyway).
I'll try to start working on my cdd-tool proposal ASAP and once we have
something that works we will see if we can get distributions like Ubuntu
involved; the good thing is that if the tools work for Debian they will
also work for Ubuntu.
--
Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> <http://people.debian.org/~sto/>
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