Hello fellow Debian developers,
let me explain shortly why I'll speak of Ubuntu on a Debian announce
list. I know that many of you do not like the Canonical marketing saying
that "Ubuntu is contributing back" because the most visible official
contribution is scott's patch repository and that all other successful
collaboration has been made at the level of individual developers who are
"friendly to Debian" and not because Canonical's policy ask them to do
so.
I believe Ubuntu fills an important gap in the Debian world and as such
I'm not satisfied when Ubuntu is diverging too much from Debian, and the
only way to avoid divergence is to merge back what's useful and to provide
better solution for derivatives when there's a need for a divergence.
That's why I'm trying to promote a more active collaboration on *BOTH*
sides. Ubuntu MOTU (Master of the Universe) are the "volunteer developers"
on the Ubuntu side and many of them are friendly with Debian and are
actively promoting good relationship with Debian (and I try to help them
for that):
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributingToDebian
(BTW this could lead to maintenance of some packages created by Ubuntu
MOTU on Alioth directly with the intent of having the same package
uploaded to both distributions)
The introduction was a bit long, but it's in this spirit of active and
intelligent collaboration that I forward a message from Lucas Nussbaum
about Ubuntu's development which may interest Debian developers who care
about which version of their package is used inside Ubuntu. Here it is :
-----
Ubuntu 6.04, codenamed Dapper, will be released on April 20th[1,2] and will be
the stable release of Ubuntu until the release of dapper+1 in October. UVF
(Upstream Version Freeze)[3] is on January 19th for Dapper.
Upstream Version Freeze is the time when Ubuntu stops importing ("syncing")
packages automatically from Debian. After UVF, packages require a manual
process to get in. Exceptions requiring confirmation are[3] :
* Packages in or relating to Ubuntu's specific goals for the release
* Minor fixes, if the upstream change is a micro-increment (or equivalent)
* Major fixes, particularly blockers, if the upstream change is a
minor-increment (or equivalent)
* Exceptional circumstances
If you have some uploads pending, and would like to see those packages
included in Ubuntu Dapper, it would be great if you could upload them
before the 19th. Note that this doesn't mean that your package will get into
Dapper for sure: if Ubuntu has specific local changes (patches that
weren't integrated by Debian for some reason), merging is still a manual
process and might not be done in time for Dapper.
If for whatever reason you don't want to upload the new package to Debian
directly, you can also ask someone from Ubuntu to include your new package
in Ubuntu directly (just ask on #ubuntu-devel on IRC, Freenode network, or
via mail on ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com).
To know what is the version of your packages currently in Ubuntu, you can
use [4] (all of Debian and Ubuntu), [5] (only Ubuntu's universe packages,
where your package most likely is). Note that packages with the same
version in Debian and Ubuntu are excluded from the listings.
You can also use [6] of course.
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperReleaseSchedule
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperReleaseProcess
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UpstreamVersionFreeze
[4] http://tiber.tauware.de/~lucas/versions/all-packages.html
[5] http://tiber.tauware.de/~lucas/versions/unimultiverse.html
[6] http://packages.ubuntu.com/
----
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature