Re: ubuntu-science

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>]

On 7 January 2006 at 18:16, Daniel Leidert wrote:
| Am Freitag, den 06.01.2006, 23:22 -0800 schrieb Jordan Mantha:
| > I am 
| > encouraging the MOTUScience team members to at least email this list 
| > when a new science package has been added to Ubuntu so that we don't get 
| > a lot of duplication of work.
| 
| You see the duplicate of work? Debian user or maintainers of science
| package have to remember to send mails to the Ubuntu lists and the
| Ubuntu guys have to do the same and send mails to the Debian lists.

I am with you. I am still confused about this whole thing:

-- On the one hand Ubuntu/Kubuntu is a well put together distro and I run
   Kubuntu on a few machines and like it. I happily recommend it, and its
   polish and coherence make it really quite pleasant. I only use it on 'use
   only' non-development machines.

-- On the other hand as a maintainer (of currently 72 packages), I am
   _appalled_ and _shocked_ by the lack of feedback from Ubuntu to Debian --
   at least as far as I can see. There was a thread on debian-planet a while
   that mentioned Ubuntu bug archive. Sure enough, there were patches to
   (though in my case only a few) packages of mine. Nobody ever bothered
   to let me know, yet at the same time Ubuntu is happy to take advantage of
   the work I've been doing here for now over a decade of diligently
   maintaining my set of packages. 

-- Lastly as the one behind Quantian, the to my knowledge single largest
   collection of scientific / numerical / quantitative apps in one
   ready-to-run place, I'd love to pull the two resources in and get, say,
   the more polished desktop experience and menu organisation of (K)Ubuntu
   back into Debian / Knoppix / Quantian, and would also love to pull some of
   the additional packages in.  But I am
     * still puzzled about the binary interchangeability, or lack thereof,
       between Ubuntu and Debian
     * confused as to why one would want to insert a package into Ubuntu
       but not Debian (other than the needing a DD sponsor reason).

I really don't want to be confrontational, or start another useless flame
war. But given Debian and debian-science, how can we achieve the best
outcomes with the least amount of duplication and waste?

Thoughts or comments?

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison