Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?
On 5/31/05, Stephen Birch <sgbirch@imsmail.org> wrote:
> Okay - you have my attention. If you are right etch will be as
> beautiful as Hoary within a few weeks of the sarge release.
I think it's been so long since Debian started having pre-sarge
freeze-spasms that we've all forgotten what it's like when the
floodgates open post-release. (I, for one, wasn't around for the last
one, but I've done a certain amount of reading.) "A few weeks" is
probably on the optimistic side. I don't know if Ubuntu has Breezy is
in any kind of usable state yet, and I don't think they let in
anything like the backlog of updates that is awaiting etch.
Once sarge does release, the Ubuntu folks are going to be right there
in the trenches with everyone else dealing with GCC 4.0, the death of
devfs, and the demands for a graphical installer. If anything they'll
be pulling Debian forward with Linux 2.6.11.bignum, just as they are
with Python 2.4 and some of the remaining java-in-main issues. It is
not in their interest to let their fork (or spoon or other implement
of destruction) go off into the rough.
> Oh my gosh, I hope and pray you are right.
>
> We are all watching ...
I'm not quite sure this is sarcasm, although I have my suspicions.
But I happened to be watching on #ubuntu-devel as the last few hoary
RCs got knocked off. These guys (and gals) are pros, and they're
excited about what they're doing, and they aren't any less committed
to Debian than they were before no-name-yet. They're used to dealing
patiently with bull-headed upstreams when wearing their DD hats, so
they can probably take Debian-Ubuntu frictions in stride.
Some things about the relationship are going to be hard, though. I
was very distressed to find that a last-minute ABI change in sarge's
glibc will cause any package built on sarge that gets a versioned
glibc dependency to be uninstallable on hoary. I really had hoped to
run the same mysql-server packages on both, and I'm not quite sure
what I'm going to do for a distro-neutral C++ build environment. :-(
Cheers,
- Michael
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