Debian-Ubuntu debate: an upstream view
By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 13 August 2009 05:58
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As detailed earlier this month, the announcement led to a long discussion as to whether time-based freezes would be better for Debian or Ubuntu; once the U word came into the discussion, it naturally got quite heated.
A little over a week ago, Mark Shuttleworth, the head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, started a fresh discussion with a post titled "On cadence and collaboration".
His suggestions were, in the main, geared towards getting the Debian developers behind the idea of freezing the next release, Squeeze, by December. Towards this end, he even offered the services of Ubuntu developers to the Debian project.
The December freeze was part of Debian's original announcement by the release team, but it was rescinded once developers made their feelings clear.
Shuttleworth's post started a long thread; there were plenty of anti- posts and a few in support.
One reply from developer Matthias Andree was noteworthy if only for the fact that it was from the one breed who rarely figured in the discussion.
Andree is an upstream maintainer of fetchmail (remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility) and leafnode (an NNTP news server for small networks). He is also a co-maintainer of bogofilter (a spam filter).
Andree questioned some of Shuttleworth's arguments by pointing out that any move towards joint freezes by Debian and Ubuntu would not result in developers becoming any friendlier towards Ubuntu, but the reverse.
He highlighted the lack of communications with upstream maintainers by pointing to a six-month-old bug in bogofilter which had lain unattended to in the Ubuntu bug tracking system.
He added that bugs and bug changes were often forwarded to many people but nobody bothered to have a look.
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