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Re: relationship with Ubuntu - call for feedback



On Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:51:53 +0100
Iain Lane <laney@debian.org> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 02:29:56PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > [ Mail-Followup-To: -derivatives ]
> > 
> > Dear Developers,
> > […] 
> > To represent Debian's views instead of only my own, I'm looking for
> > feedback on how do you think relationships among the two projects
> > have evolved in the past 18 months.

> 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.

For those of us not familiar with Ubuntu (or extras.ubuntu) package
acceptance policies, why would the new service be easier? Is it going
to accept lower quality packages, or same quality, but different
location, or simply packages that don't integrate as thoroughly with
the rest of the system?

> 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

How would they shrink universe? by moving more into main/extras, or
blacklisting stuff from the sync?

> 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

We being Ubuntu? Its not a new way of doing software distribution.

> 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?

I hope the model doesn't generally catch on, but as long as
$what_i_run_today doesn't do it she'll be right...

thanks,
kk

-- 
Karl Goetz, (Kamping_Kaiser / VK7FOSS)
http://www.kgoetz.id.au
No, I won't join your social networking group

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