Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?
Matt Zimmerman <mdz@ubuntu.com> writes:
> Debian does, in fact, treat most of its upstreams precisely this way.
> Debian publishes a large portion of its changes primarily in the form of
> monolithic diffs relative to upstream source. The last time I saw
> figures, the usage of dpatch, cdbs, etc. was rising, but not yet the
> standard operating procedure.
I know you already know this, but just for the record: Lack of separated
patches in the package source tree is not necessarily a sign that upstream
has not received separated patches. For example, I use Subversion and
svn-buildpackage for some packages, and my changes may appear from a
packaging standpoint as a monolithic .diff file, but I would feed
individual patches upstream into their bug tracking system or mailing list
as appropriate.
I agree that dpatch is rather nice (I'm not as fond of dbs), but it is an
additional level of complexity that isn't necessary to communicate with
upstream properly. It mostly becomes worth it when one is juggling quite
a few separate patches or pulling individual fixes from somewhere and
versioning the patches themselves becomes useful.
> Regarding your specific example, I know of no reason why Debian couldn't
> use Ubuntu's X.org packages when Debian is ready to make the transition,
> but in the end that will be the XSF's decision, not Ubuntu's.
There appears to be a bunch of work going on around this right now,
without a ton of fanfare. (Pretty much the ideal situation, as far as I'm
concerned. It's usually a good sign when matters get to the point that
people are committing things rather than talking about what to commit.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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