The Feud: Debian-Ubuntu Relationship (via Debian.org Mailing Lists)
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:32:09AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:1 > I've been invited to give a talk at the forthcoming Ubuntu Developer 2 > Summit, on May 13th in Brussels. I've accepted, since I'd like to take 3 > the chance of the talk to present to the Ubuntu (and Canonical) people 4 > how we feel about the state of the Debian-Ubuntu relationship. I'm 5 > therefore seeking your feedback on the topic, in order to present our 6 > views rather than mine only.So, I'm now back and with some feedback to share. I'll first post (in this mail) a summary of the replies I got to this "poll" and later on a more general summary of what I did at UDS.
Figures
I got about 50 feedback mails in a bit less than 2 weeks, which I consider a fair amount of feedback. In case people are interested in giving more feedback, by all means go ahead and mail me. The more, the better. Obviously, the summary I report below is limited to the feedback mails I got thus far.
Success stories
I got quite an amount of "submissions" for the success stories category (frankly, more than I expected).
The most appreciated collaboration paradigm between Debian and Ubuntu seems to be "mixed teams", where people from both distros work together using some $VCS. I got report about a dozen such teams, of varying sizes from a handful of packages to several hundreds. An interesting and appreciated trend is that such teams usually lead to a direct involvement in Debian by Ubuntu people: first as DMs, then as DDs, and in some cases also to greater involvement such as becoming members of our core teams (e.g.: ftp-master).
Other reported success stories are in the development of some core tools such as dpkg and d-i where, starting from Ubuntu-specific needs, generic technical solutions have been developed, benefiting not only Debian and Ubuntu, but all possible Debian derivatives.
People also appreciate bug filing from Ubuntu [1] (especially if with patches [2]) in the context of large changes such as the default gcc version.
Interestingly enough, even for parts of the two distros that are packaged independently (e.g. GNOME), some Debian people have now more trust in Ubuntu patches than in the past and that entails a more fruitful exchange or cherry pick of patches.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=origin-ubuntu;users=ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=ubuntu-patch;users=ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
FAIL.
Now to what people don't currently like in the Debian-Ubuntu relationship.
I won't spare much mail space to discuss episodes that concern individuals. In fact, one such episode (i.e. the "python affair", see #573745) has been reported by several people, and details can be found in the tech-ctte bug log.
Beside that, people don't like when Canonical does not behave as a good upstream, e.g. when they are not reactive to Debian developers as their downstream distributors. More generally, people would like to see efforts in packaging Canonical software---when is not Ubuntu specific---into Debian directly.
Similarly, people don't like when Ubuntu does not behave as a proper downstream. In particular, there seems to be a desire to have more triaging of Launchpad bug and then forwarding to the Debian BTW when they apply to Debian too (no surprise here: it is the most "traditional" complain Debian had wrt Ubuntu).
Several people do care about the status of their Debian packages in the Ubuntu distribution. As a consequence, those people find annoying when those packages degrade in quality due to reasons not under their control (e.g. they are synced in bad moments, patched inappropriately, etc.); that seems to mostly affect the Ubuntu universe.
Requests
The last category of feedback sought in the poll was "requests".
A recurrent request is to give more credit to Debian. Coming from the tradition of free software, people have no problem with the fact that Ubuntu benefits from Debian work, but they feel that the mantra "give credit where credit is due" should be better respected. All in all, people don't like the equation "GNU/Linux = Ubuntu" which is slowly getting through.
Another recurrent request is to push the culture of "do changes in Debian first". That would mean discussing changes in Debian first; then, *if* an agreement can be reached (which is not necessarily the case, of course), people would like to see those changes implemented in Debian first; from there, they will naturally flow to Ubuntu.
Then, I've also collected tons of technical requests related to how Debian people can more easily interact with the Ubuntu infrastructure (most notably with Launchpad) in "their" way, i.e. via mail, via the Debian BTS, etc. In that category---that I won't detail to avoid abusing your patience---there is stuff like: an opt-in service to be notified of Launchpad bugs, Ubuntu accepting uploads from our keyring, Ubuntu having something like patch-tracker.d.o to better split patches, etc.
While on the above I've noticed no real convergence, it seems that in general those Debian people which care about their packages in Ubuntu, would like to have a contact point where to drop sync requests. It seems that using the suggested way to do that (don't ask me what it is :)) does not really work, as they get lost in the noise or similar.
Ok, for the first time I've seen -- a real account of the feud going on why some people are hating Canoncial (the makers of Ubuntu). Lately, I see 140 character posts on Twitter or Identi.ca that is just "complaining" without any real concrete reasons. If this is the reason, then there is something you complain about. However, denting/tweeting is not a good format.
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