Re: Ubuntu packages for Debian
Steffen:
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Steffen Moeller
<moeller@inb.uni-luebeck.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just received a request to upload a series of packages for Debian that
> are already available for Ubuntu.
>
> Is there a policy document on how to give appropriate credit for the
> original work? What if the version we are going to upload is newer than
> what is in Ubuntu?
If you are basing your package on their work, then I think
debian/copyright is an appropriate place to keep track of such
historical information. However, if you are instead simply replicating
the packages which are packaged for Ubuntu in Debian, then this is
neither necessary nor (in my opinion) actually warranted.
Depending on the divergence between Ubuntu and Debian, it might be
easier just to start from scratch. I know that with Perl modules in
particular, it doesn't take very long to prepare a package (and would
indeed take longer to adapt one taken from Ubuntu)
>
> I am of course strongly suggesting to talk to the Ubuntu maintainers and
> hopefully thus start sharing as many file as possible in a common
> repository, but no matter if this works out or not - is there anything
> special for me to do?
I'm not sure how this could work, considering many of the package
names in Ubuntu and Debian conflict (sometimes a package is available
in Ubuntu but under a different name than that in Debian, or vice
versa). Definitely it's important to try to get packages upstream from
Ubuntu into Debian if possible, and have Ubuntu sync our packages
(they have scripts available for this purpose).
However, that requires cooperate Ubuntu Developers to work with you.
Where possible, I would strongly advocate moving packages into Debian
and having Ubuntu sync from us -- if only because of all the
derivatives based on Debian, it would allow them to benefit some from
the work of the Ubuntu folk as well.
TL;DR version: use debian/copyright.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Steffen
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