Re: [ad-hominem construct deleted]
On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 12:30:22PM +0200, Riku Voipio wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 January 2006 11:01, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> > So you are saying it's the Debian Developer's job to pull changes from
> > ubuntu back? If that is an official statement, then that would be useful
> > for a d-d-a mail so we are aware of it.
>
> This is what also wonder about ubuntu-haters. Somehow it is OK for
> Debian to have different opinions and preferences ("Tell me about changes"
> vs "don't spam me" or "You don't Attribute my work" vs "Don't put my
> name there").
>
> But at the same time you require a explict policy from ubuntu and anytime
> a ubuntu developer says something about it is considered a official position
> statetement.. Until we can do a official statement of debian derivate
> policy ourselfs, we can hardly require it from them..
We don't have to require an official position statement from Ubuntu -- it's
already been published. The other difference is that Ubuntu has a Dictator
For Life, who runs the show, while Debian is just a loose collection of
people who elect someone annually to keep them out of mischief. <grin>
Also, other Debian derivatives and Gentoo/Fedora/OpenSUSE don't make a habit
of touting their contributions to Debian, and that's been the main complaint
that I've seen in this thread -- that Ubuntu *talks* about contributing back
to Debian, but isn't *seen* to be doing so, on a systematic basis.
> > Do you imply with this message that Ubuntu doesn't care about quality
> > in their upstreams but rather keep their stuff to themselfes?
>
> The same can be claimed about about Debian and our upstreams. Not all
> maintainers submit their patches upstream, and sometimes our lack
> of co-operation have made our upstreams really unhappy (Remember micq?).
The micq debacle wasn't about Debian not sending patches upstream, it was
about Debian not being able to keep up-to-date with the intentional
breakages of the ICQ protocol by Miribilis, and consequently making micq
(and hence, it's author) look bad.
> > And I like to point out that there isn't any correspondence between the
> > ubuntu developers and the debian developers in respect to getting
> > sensible patches they do back into debian, which very much disappoints
> > me, if not does get me a bad opinion on the intentions of ubuntu.
>
> Ubuntu (and other derivates) are using the same freedoms Debian
> is built upon. We would not accept a licence that required us to submit
> our patches upstream (dissident and desert island tests), so howcome it
> is OK to require such behaviour from our downstreams?
We're not requiring any particular behaviour from our downstreams beyond
licence compliance and "keeping their promises".
- Matt
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