Senior Debian developer Martin Krafft doesn't mind admitting that it will be a difficult task to achieve this, but that doesn't mean he is going to give up trying.

Krafft devoted a session at Australia's national Linux conference in Hobart today to presenting details about the concept; his talk was titled "Cross-distro collaboration: packaging with modern version control systems."

A project was started about two years ago with this objective but Krafft says it is still highly Debian-centric.

"Lots of work needs to be done," he told iTWire in an interview. "Achieving consensus within a single project is difficult so you can imagine how difficult it would be achieve consensus between a number of distributions."

Version control systems are being used to manage Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and so on but there is duplication of work. The solution which would work for everyone is a distributed version control system.

Krafft agrees that it has to be a voluntary thing; no-one can be coerced into joining, they have to come on board of their own accord.

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