Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?
On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 04:49:20AM +0200, mag wrote:
> 2005-05-31, k keltezéssel 16.24-kor John Hasler ezt írta:
> Forks in OSS do have drawbacks, this is why they are generally frowned
> upon. Of course there are cases when advantages greater than drawbacks,
> esp. when the latter are minimized, e.g. by submitting back patches.
> Taxonomists may argue that such forks has to be called spoons;)
> Other taxonomist may also argue that Debian is an infrastructural
> distribution, which is well suited to be the base of such "spoons".
Perhaps, but there are some issues with that.
In the ubuntu case in particular, I wish that they would be more
proactive in sending their patches to the Debian maintainers. Asking
us Debian folk to go to an obscure site somewhere, wade through
listings of thousands of diffs, and find changes is difficult. For
example, Python 2.4 is in sid, and I don't mind making my packages use
it now. I'd appreciate any and all diffs from ubuntu folks.
Sometimes they are changing things for some unique "ubuntu way". I'd
like to ask them: why must the Ubuntu way be different from Debian?
Is there a better way we could minimize patches and perhaps do
something like provide differing defaults?
I've also been on the other side of the coin, and something that makes
it difficult for the derivers is lack of communication from some
quarters of Debian. I certainly recall frustration about inactive
maintainers, and we must remember that there are maintainers in Debian
that can't even be bothered to apply good patches when they see them.
Finally, I would like to see many more developers putting their
packages a distributed version control system like Arch or, better
yet, Darcs. It makes it a lot easier for others to collaborate with
you. For an example of what I'm talking about, see
http://darcs.complete.org. Most of the directories there are Debian
packages, and most of my Debian packages are in darcs.
darcs-buildpackage and tla-buildpackage are your friends :-)
-- John
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