Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?
On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 12:06:39AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 07:47:19PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > After Sarge, releases, it should be pretty straightforward for someone to
> > set up a script to mass-mail Debian maintainers copies of the Python
> > transition patches from Ubuntu (or all of the patches, if that's really what
> > they believe that Debian maintainers want).
>
> I'd prefer wishlist bugs tagged patch when there is a patch relevant
> for Debian, personally.
That would be only slightly more work for someone to automate. I see no
need to argue about whether Ubuntu should push; the patches are all there in
an easily accessible tree, and it would be trivial to pull the patches and
push them someplace else if that's desirable.
> > You might as well ask the same question of any Debian derivative. The
> > reason that derivatives exist is because people want different things.
> > In the case of Ubuntu, we outline on our website what we do differently.
>
> I'm aware of that. There are cases, though, where people tend to create a
> difference when it's not necessary. A common place is graphics on the
> default desktop. I don't know if Ubuntu changes those, but I know some
> derivatives do, and thus have to fork some packages. I figure it would be
> easier to use /etc/alternatives to manage those defaults, but that's just
> me.
We're going to do the work to make this kind of branding easy in Ubuntu. If
the appropriate Debian maintainers will merge some of those patches, so much
the better.
> Out of curiousity, do you have a rough estimate of the percentage that
> actually make it into Debian? Or the percentage that are held back
> with no good reason?
I don't have any hard statistics, but here are some random examples of
patches whose development was sponsored by Canonical, were tested and proven
in Ubuntu, were proactively submitted to Debian by an Ubuntu developer, and
remain in debbugs months later without comment from the maintainer:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=298060
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=298064
Several similar patches were submitted after a comprehensive review of
daemon privileges in Ubuntu, and at last count, only one of them had made it
into Debian proper.
I'm not trying to make anyone look bad, least of all Debian developers who
are spending their leisure time on package maintenance. It's just fact that
it sometimes takes an indefinite period of time to get changes into Debian,
even if every effort is made to simplify the process for the maintainer.
> BTW, the baz folks could get some very neat ideas from darcs. The
> "offline mode comes free" way of working is very nice, and the
> branching being easier than Arch is nice, too.
The next generation of Bazaar aims to incorporate the best bits of other
revision control systems, including darcs:
http://www.bazaar-ng.org/
If you care to discuss particular ideas, I suggest mailing either the
bazaar-ng mailing list, or Martin Pool.
--
- mdz
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