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Re: relationship with Ubuntu - call for feedback



On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Iain Lane <laney@debian.org> wrote:
> There is a push, and coming with it a growing movement, to get
> applications into Ubuntu via a new Application Review process (aka
> extras.ubuntu.com) which is a parallel repository available for stable
> releases only that is not a part of the distribution.
>
> I have seen numerous people advising authors to direct their packages
> towards this new process instead of the usual Debian→Universe→Backports
> route into a stable release.
>
> Some members of the community are promoting, in tandem with these
> developments, a push for a smaller Universe and indeed a questioning of
> why one would want to contribute upstream at all. Here's a couple of
> quotes from recent mailing list threads

<snip>

> It seems to me that this is a fundamental shift in what we consider a
> distribution to be, becoming a 'platform' on top of which people offer
> applications (the app-store model which the software centre promotes)
> rather than a collection of all the great Free Software out there. I
> fear a negative impact on both distribution developer motivation and the
> quality of the distros (including a knock-on impact on Debian as
> upstream) if this new method of distributing apps takes hold and the
> next generation of nice applications never see themselves in the
> distribution.
>
> WDYT? Is there a real problem here?

As an Ubuntu developer who also contributes directly to Debian, it
certainly has made me question my future roll in Ubuntu.


>> - number of people active in one project becoming active in the other
>
> Definitely at least two of this year's DD intake (and one in NM),
> including myself, started out in Ubuntu and have migrated over.

Well, I for one have finally gotten my key into the Debian
Maintainer's key ring. It was a pretty painful experience, but that
mainly had to do with the fact that I first applied for DM as the push
to transition from 1024-bit DSA keys to 4096-bit RSA keys had just
gotten under way. While not necessarily something for the Debian
Project as a whole, I would love to see DDs who are also Ubuntu
Developers mentoring other interested Ubuntu Developers through the
path to becoming a DD.

-- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio

   Ubuntu Developer <https://launchpad.net/~andrewsomething>
   Debian Maintainer
<http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=a.starr.b%40gmail.com>
   PGP/GPG Key ID: D53FDCB1


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