On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 07:36:06AM +0000, Martin Meredith wrote: > But, also - and I've had this experience myself - there are some DD's who > just plain and simple dont want the stuff from ubuntu. I've had a couple > of times where I've had an issue with a package - and realised it was a > problem in debian and upstream too. Usually - I've contacted both upstream > and the DD via Email about this - and have had various responses - for > example, for one package - I sent about 7 emails over the space of a > month, emailed upstream, tried to contact the DD on IRC - many a thing - > but well - no response - and I've tried a couple of times with different > issues to contact that developer regarding those issues - but have never > had any awknowledgement, reply etc etc. Out of curiosity, when emailing these DDs, do you send mail through the BTS? It's not unknown for developers to filter bts mail differently from mail sent to their maintainer addresses; and as missing (or over-committed) maintainers are a constant issue in an org as large as Debian, making sure information reaches the BTS makes it possible for a future maintainer to pick up the pieces more readily. > To me though - and i will stress this highly - I don't think that it's a > fact that ubuntu isnt contributing to debian - because it is. But I > believe that some people (maybe a lot of people) for whatever issue aren't > willing to work either way - as Ubuntu can't do all the work - and nor can > debian - but - when one side isnt willing to work (I'm not on about > projects as a whole - I'm on about individual people/maintainers) then it > spoils the whole thing. FWIW, here's what I see in practice. We have Ubuntu saying that they give back to Debian; and then we have a fairly large divergence between what Debian has in unstable and what's going into the next Ubuntu release, with IME very little patch submission to the Debian BTS, plus particular individuals who are working diligently to make sure their own Ubuntu changes get integrated effectively into Debian. I haven't seen anything systematic that supports the "giving back to Debian" assertion, and I think a lot of this has to do with Ubuntu's development structures ensuring that re-merging with Debian is an afterthought, *not* the primary development modality encouraged by the leadership. Now, it may be that this is an unrealistic pipe dream on my part that's incompatible with Ubuntu's goals/release schedule, but it seems to me that everyone involved would get more mileage out of the "giving-back" process if there were more emphasis on trying to get changes made in sid *before* changing things in universe, wherever possible. I realize there are some practical issues on the Debian side that would need to be addressed to make this a reality, and I know there are plenty of cases when Ubuntu won't be able to wait for Debian before making particular changes, but I think it would greatly mitigate the concerns over divergence if people viewed universe as less of a sandbox for innovation than they seem to today. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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