List of upsides/downsides of contributing back to Debian
Hello,
it would be nice to extend http://wiki.debian.org/DerivativesFrontDesk (or
the FAQ) with a list of reasons why one would want to cooperate more
closely with Debian (and also to be fair a list of possible downsides).
Here are some of my own elements (that applies in particular for
a derivative with many new packages to contribute to Debian).
Advantages:
- you benefit automatically from the QA checks made by the Debian
volunteers
- security support by Debian on your packages once they are in a
stable release
- much larger userbase that is testing your packages
- you can get help maintaining some of your packages (particularly true
for big teams like the perl one), for the less important ones you can
even try to find someone else to take on the maintenance
- the closer you get to Debian, the smaller is the "delta" that you
have to maintain from one release to the next.
Disadvantages:
- it takes more time to get all your packages properly accepted/integrated
in Debian
- you might have to deal with porting problems that you don't care about
(for instance if you're only interested in i386/amd64)
- you can only contribute packages that you commit to maintain and due to
this (some of) your team members should aim to become Debian maintainer
and thus have to agree with Debian's goals & values.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer
- packages uploaded to Debian target the unstable distribution, so there
might be discrepancies between the package that you use in production
right now and the packages that you contribute to debian (although in
the majority of the cases there are ways to keep a single source package
that works for both distributions)
Feel free to expand/reword and put something comprehensive in the wiki page.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Pre-order a copy of the Debian Administrator's Handbook and help
liberate it: http://debian-handbook.info/liberation/
Reply to: