El Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 10:37:13AM +0100, Andreas Tille va escriure:
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Sergio Talens-Oliag wrote:
> > 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.
> It is possible to explain in short why they do so? I Debian grown to an
Well, there are a lot of reasons:
- Ubuntu only compiles for three architectures
- The supported system contains less than 1.000 packages
- It's developers are paid to work on packaging and mainteinance
- Ubuntu has a time-based release schema, with a new release each 6 months
- They plan to always have the latest GNOME stable release on their distro
> inflexible behemoth with irresponsible maintainers? Should also Debian
Debian can't do things like Ubuntu:
- Debian has 11 architectures,
- The current testing system has more than 14000 packages in main,
- Development and mainteinance is done by volunteers,
- We don't have a predictable release policy, but the idea *now* is to try
to keep things stable to be able to release *sarge* and that has means
responsible maintainers try not to update to latest and greatest and
introduce more bugs,
> learn some lessons from Ubuntu to cope with new requirements. I hope our
> fellow maintainers working on Ubuntu will not hide if Debian has problems
> in itself.
Well, IMHO, we can benefit from the greater Ubuntu flexibility, that is,
they can implement and try things more easily than we do, and if the things
they do work as expected then maintainers can include them on the Debian
packages with less troubles (part of the testing is done on Ubuntu, not on
Debian).
Anyway Debian has problems, but they are not related to Ubuntu, it is more a
thing of having a lot of weak spots because it is too big, it's driven by
volunteers and there are a lot of different views of what Debian is.
On Mataró someone suggested (Jeff Waugh, if I remember it right) that the
Debian Project has to admit that the Distribution has become a big meta
distribution and that derived distributions like Ubuntu or the Spanish
derivatives are not against it, but simply a way to distribute the
Debian work.
He explained that this is what happened to the GNOME project, once they
noticed that Distributors were not their enimies they started to release in
source code only, leaving the binary packages to distributions like Debian,
RedHat, etc.
Well, I'm not against this view, but we could still ship releases anyway, it
would make my life easier... ;)
--
Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> <http://people.debian.org/~sto/>
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