Re: Derivatives, MongoDB and freezes
On 04/20/2013 07:37 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> I came across this on Planet Debian
>
> http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog//posts/lack_of_cooperation_from_ubuntu/
>
> I'm guessing that Ubuntu may not have pushed the changes to sid because
> of the freeze, that may well be the answer to Rogério's questions.
Thinking that this is the only reason is very naive. It's simply not the
case.
In some areas, Canonical guys believe they need to differentiate, even
if that means making the life of maintainers of both distributions harder.
The areas are where they focus commercially: cloud computing stacks,
desktop with Unity and MIR, and I guess soon phone and TV sets.
These are commercial decisions on some very specific parts of Ubuntu
though, and we shall care to not at all generalize this sentiment. I am
not aware that this is the case with MongoDB though, but it could well
be, since that is in the cloud thingy, which Canonical is deeply involved
commercially. It also well could be that Ubuntu maintainers are just busy,
and/or didn't care enough (eg: this could be an individual issue rather
than a company policy). Hard to know, really...
We shouldn't think too bad about such corporate decisions, this is a
commercial entity that we are dealing with, and it is very normal that
they do have an agenda (and releasing on time is always part of this
agenda).
So don't try to guess. Just remember such things can happen, and try
to deal with it in the best way possible, trying to push for more
collaboration when you can. That is the policy that I am trying to apply
to myself, and I hope it will be appreciated from both sides (eg: Debian
and Ubuntu) in the long run.
> Nonetheless, with derivatives and Debian itself having different release
> cycles, and wearing my upstream developer hat, I can't help wondering:
> how can upstreams ensure that the freshest versions of their package
> propagate to the derivatives without duplicating effort?
IMO, they can't. It is an endless effort. Though the most easy way is
to do the work in Debian so that it has more chances to propagate
in all derivatives.
> For example, to respect the Debian release process, I've avoided
> uploading the latest versions of my packages to sid, so it appears that
> newer versions of those packages missed the boat when Ubuntu started
> their freeze.
As others stated, you should have uploaded these to Experimental.
> This means that both Debian and Ubuntu will release with
> versions of the packages that are old and don't have the latest bug
> fixes and/or any manual effort to work around that takes away time that
> could be spent on more bug fixes or features.
Bugs can be fixed, even after releases...
For the latest versions, we have SID / Experimental, so it is easy to
cherry-pick what you need, even during the freeze. Then we have
backports. It is to be noted that even Ubuntu people are deeply
thinking about having backports repositories for their LTS releases.
I'm not sure how far they are in that process though.
Thomas
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