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Re: Easy way to incorporate Ubuntu improvements back into Debian?



On Fri, 05 May 2006, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > What processes, infrastructure and tools are in place to streamline
> > Debian integrating improvements Ubuntu makes?
> 
> See the Utnubu project (on Alioth).  Having automatic mail notifications
> and the like was discussed, but many DDs did not want anything to do
> with it, so the idea was quickly dropped.

The PTS will receive notifications once Gustavo Franco enables his script.
There's a new "derivatives" keyword for that. I will announce that when it
becomes effective.

> > It seems to me that Ubuntu is getting alot more out of their friendship
> > with Debian, than Debian gets out of Ubuntu.  Anyone have comments on
> > this?  Please correct me if I'm wrong, and examples would be great.
> > Does Debian get lots of benefits from Ubuntu (in the software) that I'm
> > unaware of?
> 
> ... GNOME, Xorg, et al.

We do benefit but we could benefit way more. In several occasions when I
discovered an interesting bug fix in Ubuntu I informed the Debian
maintainer. (example: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=351621)

Some people like Ian Jackson work for Ubuntu and always send their patches
back to Debian: he has done so for at least dpkg and firefox on several
occasions. Colin Watson is working directly on debian-installer as part of
his Ubuntu work as well.

I wish more Ubuntu developers would act like Ian and Colin.

Ubuntu also introduced some packages to provide better support for laptop
(like acpi-support) and those packages are not always submitted back. I
recently asked Matthew Garrett to upload it to Debian also so that our
laptop task could install it... 

In short: in many cases we need to pull out ourselves what we want, you
can't rely on Ubuntu developers to send all enhancements to us directly.
That's sad, but that's not a reason to not make the effort to look into
Ubuntu and see what we can grab.

And that's precisely the purpose of Utnubu... but this project needs fresh
blood. There's a dormant mailing list and that's all right now.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/



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