Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@ubuntu.com>]

Pierre Habouzit wrote:

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 10:29:11AM +0100, Steve Langasek wrote:
  

I'm sorry that you have a negative impression of Ubuntu's relationship
with Debian, but there's plenty of data available that contradicts
your conclusion (including BTS reports that have been posted to this
very thread).
    

The problem is there is also plenty of data, like for example the recent
#539950 (on a package never uploaded to Debian) which is looking a _lot_
like LP#408901. In this bug, the Ubuntu developer is (IMHO) trying to
make the Debian one find, fix and patch the bug for him.

The problem is (as a DD) that I would expect Ubuntu to collaborate the
most on the harder core packages, meaning the toolchain, the kernel,
X... Alas, it happens more coincidentally than on a regular basis, and
that saddens me.

I'm not saying there aren't any working cases of cooperation, and I
welcome them. But there are way too many example of bad (or rather
inexistant) cooperation, or even dirty tricks like #539950, which
undermines the former tries a lot.
  

Pierre,

When you have two large, complex, passionate organisations there will always be plenty of opportunities to find fault with one another. Do you not believe that it would be possible to find a long list of cases where Debian developers have acted in a way that made collaboration difficult or impossible, or could be interpreted as bad faith? Of course it would.

Nevertheless, we never let those incidents poison our commitment to working better with Debian. On balance, when I look at the huge effort that has gone into better collaboration with Debian, from many core and MOTU developers in Ubuntu, I think we should celebrate those successes and inspire people to do more of that, rather than taking every opportunity to find fault.

In this conversation, there are large groups of people who's starting assumption is that "Ubuntu is bad", or "Debian is difficult", and they find facts to support that assumption. Fair enough, that's human nature. But it will never improve the state of the world to focus on things that people believe are absolute - if you want to improve the state of the world, you need to look for opportunities to make it better.

Instead of saying "there's a bug that was badly handled, so we should never collaborate better on anything", let's look for opportunities to make things better. We have a good opportunity to make a profound change in the way upstreams and distributions engage. A change that will really help the whole free software ecosystem, and many distributions beyond Ubuntu and Debian. Isn't it worth exploring that idea for its full value?

Mark