On 2013-04-20 04:37, Daniel Pocock wrote:
I came across this on Planet Debian http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog//posts/lack_of_cooperation_from_ubuntu/I'm guessing that Ubuntu may not have pushed the changes to sid becauseof the freeze, that may well be the answer to Rogério's questions.
Those changes are extremely recent. For instance, MongoDB 2.2 was only uploaded to Ubuntu on March 21. The ARM changes are also just from this recent raring cycle which only began in October.
MongoDB is getting a lot of attention because it is at the core of Juju. Normally this much delta would be avoided, but some new features from 2.2 are needed and ARM is an important platform for Ubuntu server.
Typically Ubuntu takes a pattern of re-converging with Debian as much as possible early in each 6 month cycle. So I would expect that we will get quite a few patches pushed toward Debian unstable right about the time wheezy releases.
Nonetheless, with derivatives and Debian itself having different releasecycles, and wearing my upstream developer hat, I can't help wondering: how can upstreams ensure that the freshest versions of their package propagate to the derivatives without duplicating effort?
These patches, by and large should not require duplication. If you look, some of the arm support patches happened in Fedora, not Ubuntu. Now, I think I might scold my colleagues in Ubuntu for not annotating their patches with bug reports so we can make sure they get forwarded to upstream and closed. But as long as these issues are being forwarded upstream, they should not be "duplicated" at all.
For example, to respect the Debian release process, I've avoideduploading the latest versions of my packages to sid, so it appears thatnewer versions of those packages missed the boat when Ubuntu startedtheir freeze. This means that both Debian and Ubuntu will release withversions of the packages that are old and don't have the latest bugfixes and/or any manual effort to work around that takes away time thatcould be spent on more bug fixes or features
Debian is focused on stable releases. There's nothing "wrong" with this model, but it does mean you don't get the latest upstreams without diverging. IMO this is why upstream packaging should be embraced and enhanced rather than focusing on dpkg.
I once worked on the 'pkgme' project for Ubuntu and there have been others, but never followed through. The idea was just to build debian source packages from upstream sources. Upstreams should be able to release a package which serves their needs, and Debian should be able to consume these almost directly. Where Debian's efforts should be focused is on things like license verification and helping bug reports and fixes get to upstream.