Re: What happened to Agnula.org (DeMuDi)?
On 6/16/07, Joseph Neal <vlvtelvis@speakeasy.net> wrote:
Piping in as a user, I can say this has caused me a bit of confusion on more
than one occasion. Given that there are versions of the same packages which
are alternately hosted by debian-multimedia.org and maintained by Christian
Marillat and hosted by debian.org and maintained by debian-multimedia, I
imagine I'm not the only one who is never sure which version of ffmpeg is
installed. If debian-multimedia.org is supposed to be an unofficial mirror,
the fact that it shares a name with the debian team maintaining the official
multimedia packages is also likely a cause for confusion.
The debian-multimedia.org and debian.org multimedia packages are
separate, just like debian.org and all the other repositories listed
on apt-get.org. To find out what the differences are one has to
manually compare the source packages. In the case of ffmpeg I believe
the main difference is that Debian strips some non-free and
patent-encumbered code. Also the two packages have different update
frequencies.
This points out a problem Debian has which Ubuntu has solved; we need
to acknowledge that we cannot be 'upstream' for every package in the
distribution. It is perhaps a noble goal, but it isn't terribly
practical. There are many sources of debs out there and it might be
good for Debian to pull packaging from external sources, such as
packaging on individual upstream download pages and the various
repositories set up by enthusiastic packagers out there on the net. An
interesting experiment would be to employ merge-o-matic (IIRC that is
what Ubuntu uses to merge from Debian) in combination with manual
review by developers. Please issue any followups to this point to the
utnubu-discussion list for now.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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