Re: For those who care about their packages in Ubuntu

[Scott Ritchie <scott@open-vote.org>]

On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 01:53 -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz@ubuntu.com> writes:
> 
> > In practice, it doesn't work out to mean the same thing, however.  Most of
> > the packages in universe are maintained only by the Debian maintainer, and
> > propagated unmodified into Ubuntu.  It is only when there is a specific
> > motive to change the package in Ubuntu that anyone on that team will touch
> > it.
> 
> They are *not* maintained by the Debian maintainer, for the simple
> reason that the Debian maintainer does not have control over the
> contents of the package!

But what about when packages in universe are simply merged in straight
from Debian?  It might be a strange semantic question: Is that the same
package, or a different one?

In the case of such a package, the same fixes by the Debian maintainer
to the Debian package do end up in the contents of the Ubuntu package
when it gets resynched.

Now, before I confuse myself with word games and contemplate whether
that implies "control" or not, I'm going to offer up the conjecture that
bug reports on an Ubuntu universe package are potentially more relevant
to a Debian maintainer than bug reports on a Debian stable package,
since they're closer to the current unstable.

Thoughts?
Scott Ritchie