Hi, On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 01:07:39PM +0000, Anthony Towns wrote: > I'm not aware of any apples-to-apples comparisons of Debian's and Ubuntu's > "quality"; but personally I haven't seen much evidence that Debian's > is significantly superior (NB: I haven't used Ubuntu LTS personally, > though). The tradeoffs to me seem to be: > > Debian stable Ubuntu LTS > > 2 year rel cycle 2 year rel cycle > 3 years security 3 years desktop security, 5 years server > guaranteed freeze date guaranteed release date > support for all pkgs support for main, best-effort for universe > stabilise from testing upgrade support from previous Ubuntu 6mo release > upgrade from oldstable upgrade support from previous Ubuntu LTS (?) > support for 6-12 archs support for 2-3 architectures > availability of pre-installed systems > full-time security support staff > commercial quality support > larger userbase > some additional packages
What do you intend to visualize with this comparison? After all its not really fair, to list a clear pro on the one side as a pro on the other side. To make distinction clear, you need a list which compares pros on the one side to cons on the other side. Your comparison fails this at least in architectures (2-3 is worse than 6-12). > For otherwise unsupported packages in Ubuntu universe, any security > problem that Debian notices can be copied straight into Ubuntu due to > synced package versions, making "best-effort" mean "at least as good as > Debian", so there's no drawback to using packages in universe. Its not "at least as good as Debian" as appearently merges does not happen automatically. I track my packages in Ubuntu and noticed that security bugs (which I happened to have reported in Launchpad myself) where fixed by a maintainer-upload almost half a year, before Ubuntu *started* to fix it on their site. And then they decided to not fix some suites, because of EOL. > > There seems to be an assumption here that Ubuntu would benefit from bugfixes > > from Debian developers, but that the reverse would not be true. Is this > > what you believe? Does that mean you don't think Ubuntu developers > > contribute fixes back to Debian today? > > Ubuntu has a well-defined and efficient process for accepting changes > from Debian (pull from unstable regularly), Debian doesn't have a > similarly efficient process for getting contributions from Ubuntu > (Ubuntu folks file a bug, maintainer eventually incorporates it), and > that'll presumably be made worse if there's a Debian freeze for most of > the LTS development cycle. So yeah, I think it's reasonable to expect > Debian won't get that many benefits from work on Ubuntu LTS into the > corresponding stable release. Which is a fault on our side, obviously. Best Regards, Patrick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org