"When I look over the commentary on debian-devel and in debbugs and on #debian-devel, I see a lot of familiar names from Ubuntu, especially on the deep, hard problems that need solving at the core. I'm proud of that."
There is unnecessary incompatibility between Ubuntu and Debian. Their incompatible bts is one that personally bits me. The Ultimate Debian Database helps show ubuntu/debian package relationships. http://udd.debian.org/ http://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase Unfortunately Debian and Ubuntu use incompatible bts systems. Currently Ubuntu's launchpad based bug tracking system _bts_ is lacking accessible package version information. Bug tracking information tied to package version is essential for debian where packages go through many version iterations between releases. Package bugs should not be tracked based on the release. They must be tracked based on their version. This was part of the original design for Launchpad Bugs, but it never came to fruition. The very earliest bug still open on Launchpad Bugs asks for this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/424 Up to and including Hardy, ubuntu used apt-listbugs which referred to debian's bts with package version tracking. Even though this pulled bug information from the debian bts, it gave a reasonable indication of what packages contained significant bugs. apt-listbugs was withdrawn, because ubuntu package customization increasing has made the related debian bts irrelevant. Topic branches and topic trees of are ways by which package customization can be tracked. In order to meet the Debian Collaboration Team's objective the launchpad bts must interface with the debian bts. Only this way developers benefit from the topic branches, trees of distributed package source control. To collaborate bugs must be tracked across both debian and ubuntu and be accessible to both native debian and ubuntu developers.
