Re: Need for launchpad

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> 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 don't think that patches-submitted-to-the-BTS is a good way to
measure how much Ubuntu is contributing to Debian.  Ubuntu's patches
are readily available:

    http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~scott/patches/

If they were submitted to the BTS then that would just create more work
for the Debian maintainer as well as for the Ubuntu maintainer, since
the former would have to tag the report and ensure it gets closed on
the next upload, etc.  Yes, it might be more helpful than the current
breakdown of patches into "changelog" and "packaging" components if
there was a further breakdown into parts suitable for Debian and parts
not suitable for Debian.  However, to perform this breakdown would be
for Ubuntu developers to make judgments about what is suitable for
Debian, and I am sure that such judgments would provoke negative
reactions from Debian developers.

So I think that it is up to Debian maintainers to review the Ubuntu
patches from time to time and to backport what appears to be suitable
for Debian.

I agree that it would be nice if Ubuntu developers tried to get their
changes into sid.  It is certainly not their responsibility to do so,
but in my experience Ubuntu developers have been very cooperative when
they have been approached.  So I don't see a big problem.
-- 
Thomas Hood