Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?
On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 03:08:51PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> I think it is high time we revisit the traditional Debian maintainer
> model. We have been aware of its weaknesses for years, and are most
> biting in the areas of nonresponsive maintainers. I think we should
> devote some thought to declaring a permanent bug-squashing party and
> relaxing the rules for NMUs (for instance, let them happen for any
> documented bug of any severity so long as they are uploaded to the 5-day
> delayed queue and patches are posted to the BTS at the time of the
> upload). One small step down that road, anyway.
Personally, I agree, but this is something which needs to be addressed by
Debian itself. It is not the responsibility of derivatives, nor is there
anything that they can do to improve that situation. Only Debian
maintainers can effect a change here.
Ubuntu in particular seems to have drawn attention to this situation due to
the amount of activity that has happened in and around it, but it has
existed since long before Ubuntu, and we run into it ourselves as hard as
everyone else, if not harder.
> Well put. We all (Debian and the derivatives) still suck at this, and
> there's no reason that we have to.
Speaking for Ubuntu at least, we are devoting significant resources to
building tools and infrastructure to help all of us to suck less at this.
This has been the case for some time now, but there have been hard problems
to solve along the way, and we hope to start to see the fruits of this labor
soon.
--
- mdz
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