Re: Derivatives, MongoDB and freezes
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 06:57:30 AM Thomas Goirand wrote:
> 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.
This entire discussion was started by someone, who is not the maintainer or
uploader of a package, complaining on Planet Debian that Ubuntu had changes
that Debian didn't. It was entirely a guess about why, since the he didn't
bother to check with anyone involved with the package in either Debian or
Ubuntu. I agree guessing is bad.
I spoke with one of the Ubuntu people involved and he told me he's been in
contact both with the Debian maintainer and upstream about the very issues
that were whined about in the blog. So now we get to have the pointless
discussion about it spill over into -devel too.
In case anyone is confused, if someone would like to actually change the
behavior of developers in a Debian derivative, the method for doing so that's
likely to be effective is to actually communicate with them. Posting on Planet
Debian (where a derivative developer who isn't paying attention to Debian
probably isn't reading) is just pointless whining.
As far as I can tell, out of all the people conversing on the topic, I'm the
only one to go ask one of the involved parties what was happening. Random
whining in blog posts may feel good, but so do other solo activities.
Scott K
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