Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
also sprach Wouter Verhelst wou...@debian.org [2009.08.08.1500 +0200]: They are sticking to that promise. Of all the derivative distributions out there, Ubuntu is the only one that actively, as a matter of policy, does contribute back bugreports and patches. They contribute, but they're far from the only one. There are distributions that are so tightly integrated with Debian that we don't really notice their development, yet they are their own distributions: Quantian, Skolelinux, and numerous administration- and/or security-specialised derivatives, like grml, to name but a few. Those are all targetted products, like Ubuntu targets the desktop, and aims for large numbers of users. And there are distros out there who steal from us, but we don't care because we don't notice them either. It's the quantity, success, and maybe other ideological factors that make us expect too much from Ubuntu, namely to give back /more/ even though we don't make it easy for downstreams to give back. This puts the ball into our court but does not make Ubuntu a perfect player. There's a lot in Ubuntu that annoys us, from hyperbole to quality-issues, and Ubuntu are too radical about change for us to follow blindly, thus the resistance. But Ubuntu needs Debian, and they need Debian faster because we're holding them back — after all, they are not a (one-time) fork. There's a chance in that for us: we can improve Debian all along, and if we do it right, we can improve Debian with Canonical resources. But I don't think the lock-step freeze cycle is the right way forward, or that Ubuntu has the manpower, direction, or overview to support such a cadence. -- .''`. martin f. krafft madd...@d.o Related projects: : :' : proud Debian developer http://debiansystem.info `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduckhttp://vcs-pkg.org `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems * Overfiend came out of the womb complaining. -- #debian-devel digital_signature_gpg.asc Description: Digital signature (see http://martin-krafft.net/gpg/)
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 09:34:39PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 20:07, Patrick Schoenfeldschoenf...@debian.org wrote: Hi, On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 06:40:06PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: THEY STEAL our packages Uarg. That sentence let me discard everything sensible/intelligent you might have said in your mail. I often read sentences like that in the discussion. the mail was (intentionally) quite extremist, but it's not that far away from: taking everything giving back very *very* few. If you really feel that way about Ubuntu, why don't you start yelling and screaming murder about any of the other derivatives? Of all the Debian derivatives out there, Ubuntu is the one that is the *most* collaborative with Debian. Yet they are also the ones that get the hardest time from Debian developers. Taking our Free Software is *NOT* stealing. Saying that it is, is dishonest. If you really and truly feel that Ubuntu is 'stealing' from Debian, then please confirm this in a signed mail so that I can use that to ask the DAM to revoke your account. [...] It's not about licenses, legal or what, it's about honesty. If you promise to give back, you should do it. Colin Watson, one of the more active developers on debian-installer within Debian, is a Canonical employee who does most of their installer development too. Matthias Klose, the main Debian gcc maintainer, is also the Ubuntu gcc maintainer (I'm not sure whether he works for Canonical at this point in time, but at the very least he used to have an @canonical.com email address, so it is reasonable to assume that he is a current or past employee of Canonical). Someone posted links to the BTS in this thread that shows bugs and patches which the Ubuntu people have filed against Debian packages, thereby contributing back to us. For a very long time, Scott James Remnant used to be the main dpkg developer while he was working for Canonical (he stopped contributing to Debian, mainly because he lost interest; this happens to many people, not just Canonical employees). James Troup, while not very active in Debian anymore these days, used to be an archive maintainer and active DSA member while doing similar work for Ubuntu. These are just examples. I'm sure that anyone who cares can find more. Noone have forced them to promise that, and noone will force them to stick to their promises, but when I give my word I do my best to maintain it. Maybe it's only me... They are sticking to that promise. Of all the derivative distributions out there, Ubuntu is the only one that actively, as a matter of policy, does contribute back bugreports and patches. Sure, they're not feeding back 100% of their changes. Sure, sometimes they miss out a patch that really should be forwarded to Debian. But what do you really want? They can't automatically forward all their patches -- some of them just don't make sense from a Debian POV -- so they need to do this manually. When a manual process is involved, sometimes that just means it doesn't happen, because of lack of time, lack of experience with Debian's processes (as opposed to Ubuntu's), and similar. I usually find that if you yourself are interested enough in getting more contributions from Ubuntu on one or more of your packages, all you need to do is ask. A good and recent example was the 1:2.9.11-2ubuntu1 upload for nbd. When I looked at it, I couldn't understand parts of it, so I asked the person who'd done the upload for more information (you know, their name and email address are *right there*, below the changelog entry). That took all of a two-mail conversation, and I directly knew which hunks made sense to the Debian package, and which hunks didn't. Other things that can help to fetch patches from Ubuntu include #ubuntu-devel on freenode (they're usually very friendly and helpful towards Debian Developers asking about the state of their packages inside Ubuntu), patches.ubuntu.com (which indeed isn't useful for every patch, but it is when the packages don't diverge too much), and heck, our own PTS. Bottom line is, if you want it, collaboration exists, and questions will be answered; and there is no need for any Debian Developer to understand anything about Ubuntu's processes. If you yawn about how bad they are at collaborating, however, people will be less motivated to do so, and with good reason. I won't say that it wouldn't be nice if Ubuntu were to contribute more. Every contribution is good, and the more the merrier. However, if you say that there are other Debian derivatives that contribute more than Ubuntu, you're dishonest; and if you say that they do /not/ contribute, then you're outright lying. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Mark Shuttleworth dijo [Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 07:37:04AM +0100]: (...) It would be substantially easier to collaborate on RC (and non-RC) bug fixes where the base versions of major components were the same. Umm... Real, hard RC bugs will be present on more than one release of the same upstream code. Or are sometimes triggered by combinations of installed programs. So, while what you say is mostly true (it would be easier to share patches if they all applied at the precise same spot), I think the argument is a wee bit pulled too hard. Greetings, -- Gunnar Wolf • gw...@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 11:49:09AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: Perhaps Ubuntu should correct it's web page, then, in light of the apparent fact that automatic feeding of patches upstream is not in fact reality? Yes, I've forwarded this bug to the attention of the Ubuntu webmaster. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 09:04:46AM +0100, Steve Langasek wrote: I'm not sure whether this subthread is really going anywhere, given that it seems to have devolved into a complaint about the handling of a particular bug, and playing whack-a-mole on a public mailing list in response to individual interactions seems a thoroughly ineffective way to change anything about the Debian-Ubuntu relationship at large. Still, given that I have personal knowledge of the bug in question, I can't help but respond... The bug is actually not a single bug but reflects the cooperation between Ubuntu and Debian on the eglibc side. It may be different in some other areas, but it reflect my daily feelings. On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 11:18:26PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote: On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 10:29:11AM +0100, Steve Langasek wrote: I'm sorry that you have a negative impression of Ubuntu's relationship with Debian, but there's plenty of data available that contradicts your conclusion (including BTS reports that have been posted to this very thread). The problem is there is also plenty of data, like for example the recent #539950 (on a package never uploaded to Debian) which is looking a _lot_ like LP#408901. In this bug, the Ubuntu developer is (IMHO) trying to make the Debian one find, fix and patch the bug for him. The package has not yet been uploaded to Debian, but the package that was uploaded to Ubuntu is based on the Debian repo where eglibc 2.10 is being staged for upload. Why do you conclude that the Ubuntu developer is trying to make Debian find and fix the bug? Do you think that Ubuntu developers should only communicate with Debian about bugs they already know the fixes for, and that anything else implies that Ubuntu is expecting Debian to fix the bug for them? Is sharing information about known bugs not *also* a useful form of collaboration? Do you think Ubuntu developers should not communicate with Debian developers about possible upcoming regressions? Or are you only arguing that such communication should not take place in the BTS? (I can certainly sympathize with the latter, since using non-existent version numbers when filing bugs in the BTS is effectively garbage data; I'm just not clear exactly what your objection is in this case.) Given that this is almost certainly an upstream bug, and a regression vs. 2.9, I would think that the Debian maintainers would, in the general case, welcome being kept in the loop about such a bug. If that's not true, how should the Ubuntu developers know this? In this instance, the bug was forwarded to Debian by a developer who does a significant proportion of the glibc work in Ubuntu, and is not an unknown entity to the Debian glibc maintainers. If the Debian glibc maintainers don't want to receive warning about such upcoming issues, or want to receive it by other means, has any effort been made to communicate this to Matthias? (Posting to debian-project certainly doesn't count...) How in the general case is Ubuntu developer X supposed to know whether Debian maintainer Y is going to welcome being kept apprised of upcoming problems they will face when upgrading to a new upstream version, or will instead regard it as a dirty trick? In an ideal world seeing such a bug report in the Debian BTS would have been appreciated. In practice, except a few minor exceptions, the code always flows from Debian to Ubuntu, so I clearly have some a priori. I have been personally informed about this bug about 15 minutes after it has been submitted in the Ubuntu BTS, thanks to IRC. I usually get informed about problems on the Ubuntu side that way, and until recently I answered or fixed them depending on my *free time*. In short Ubuntu is doing cosmetic tweaks to the packaging, and Debian is maintaining the packaging, writing patches, and does most of the interaction with upstream. Add to that Debian is currently lacking manpower to follow the rate of the bug reports. With all those reasons, seeing a bug report from Ubuntu without much analysis than in the original bug report really makes me think Ubuntu wants to see the bug fixed by Debian. I am pretty fine cooperating with Ubuntu, provided that Ubuntu adds some manpower to do part of the job. The problem is (as a DD) that I would expect Ubuntu to collaborate the most on the harder core packages, meaning the toolchain, the kernel, X... Alas, it happens more coincidentally than on a regular basis, and that saddens me. With the exception of the kernel, where the packaging is more or less a complete fork between Debian and Ubuntu, I think all of these components are areas where Ubuntu developers collaborate. Many of the packages are often in sync between Debian and Ubuntu (with experimental if not with unstable), changes originating with Ubuntu are frequently made available in both Debian and Ubuntu simultaneously when feasible, and when not, the
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Werner Baumann wrote: The two models as I can see them from the discussion so far: Model 1: Debian freezes in December Debian developers concentrate on fixing RC bugs Ubuntu developers concentrate on including newer versions of major software packages When the number of RC bugs in Debian is low enough Ubuntu freezes Ubuntu and Debian release at approximately the same time With this model Debian developers will bear the main burden of bug fixing while Ubuntu will use the time to integrate newer software packages. Model 2: Debian and Ubuntu freeze at the same time (December?) Debian and Ubuntu developers coordinate in fixing RC bugs Debian and Ubuntu release at about the same time With this model the burden is shared and both operating system will be at the same state with respect to the main components. Differences will be according to different philosophy (questions asked by the installer, components and configuration of a standard installation, what is user friendly). There may be also differences in the versions of main software packages, but this differences would be clear at freeze time and due to different philosophy. While I think model 2 could prove useful for Debian and Ubuntu I can't see what Debian would gain from model 1. I believe this discussion would look very different if Ubuntu says it agrees on model 2. We certainly agree on the idea that multiple distributions, and all the major upstreams, would benefit from a coordinated freeze. If we sit down and agree to use the same version of the kernel, for example, that helps the kernel community plan their merge windows and merge criteria in a way that they have never been able to do before. It would be substantially easier to collaborate on RC (and non-RC) bug fixes where the base versions of major components were the same. That said, I don't believe that any distribution should feel compelled to go with a particular version. If Mandriva really wants to go with a different version of X, say, then all power to them. There will be benefits to being on a common base with others, and there will sometimes be benefits or constraints which mandate a delta for any particular distribution. So, coordinated *freezes* make a lot of sense for distributions *and* for upstreams. However, when it comes to the release, there are equally good reasons for different distributions to take different approaches. We each have different policies and focuses. We treat different issues as release blockers. We are focused on different use cases. All of those will drive differences in release dates. So, I strongly support your Option 2 as the model, but I don't think it leads to exactly the same freeze-and-release dates. It leads to a shared freeze date where we establish how much common signalling we can send to upstreams, followed by improved collaboration both with other distributions and with upstreams, and varying release dates. Is that a bad thing? Well, I think some people will say a distro is *better* if it releases later. Others will say a distro is better if it releases on a schedule. There have been so many distributions around for so long and yet each of the majors, including both Debian and Ubuntu, have loyal and passionate users. I don't think this is about trying to convince users to switch - they believe in the brands they believe in, to the credit of both groups, not to either detriment. Mark -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Pierre Habouzit wrote: On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 10:29:11AM +0100, Steve Langasek wrote: I'm sorry that you have a negative impression of Ubuntu's relationship with Debian, but there's plenty of data available that contradicts your conclusion (including BTS reports that have been posted to this very thread). The problem is there is also plenty of data, like for example the recent #539950 (on a package never uploaded to Debian) which is looking a _lot_ like LP#408901. In this bug, the Ubuntu developer is (IMHO) trying to make the Debian one find, fix and patch the bug for him. The problem is (as a DD) that I would expect Ubuntu to collaborate the most on the harder core packages, meaning the toolchain, the kernel, X... Alas, it happens more coincidentally than on a regular basis, and that saddens me. I'm not saying there aren't any working cases of cooperation, and I welcome them. But there are way too many example of bad (or rather inexistant) cooperation, or even dirty tricks like #539950, which undermines the former tries a lot. Pierre, When you have two large, complex, passionate organisations there will always be plenty of opportunities to find fault with one another. Do you not believe that it would be possible to find a long list of cases where Debian developers have acted in a way that made collaboration difficult or impossible, or could be interpreted as bad faith? Of course it would. Nevertheless, we never let those incidents poison our commitment to working better with Debian. On balance, when I look at the huge effort that has gone into better collaboration with Debian, from many core and MOTU developers in Ubuntu, I think we should celebrate those successes and inspire people to do more of that, rather than taking every opportunity to find fault. In this conversation, there are large groups of people who's starting assumption is that Ubuntu is bad, or Debian is difficult, and they find facts to support that assumption. Fair enough, that's human nature. But it will never improve the state of the world to focus on things that people believe are absolute - if you want to improve the state of the world, you need to look for opportunities to make it better. Instead of saying there's a bug that was badly handled, so we should never collaborate better on anything, let's look for opportunities to make things better. We have a good opportunity to make a profound change in the way upstreams and distributions engage. A change that will really help the whole free software ecosystem, and many distributions beyond Ubuntu and Debian. Isn't it worth exploring that idea for its full value? Mark
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Steve Langasek wrote: Does that mean you don't think Ubuntu developers contribute fixes back to Debian today? As security, contributing fixes back to Debian is not a product nor a state, it's a process. We should all be interested in optimizing this process further. http://patches.ubuntu.com/ indeed makes the packages easier to merge but it is not as powerful as our patch tracking system [1]. One possible step to improve the situation could be a similar service provided by Ubuntu based on the work which already has been done by Sean Finney. The source code is available in a public repository and it is GPL2 licensed. After such a service would have been implemented one could think about things like adding a special tag to patch headers to recommend these patches to be merged by Debian. It could also be useful to be able to specify how strong such a recommendation is. Is there already a (wiki) page which describes how a Debian maintainer can track his packages in Ubuntu or how to handle Ubuntu originated bugs? If this is the case it should be promoted better, e.g. in Misc Developer News. Carsten [1] http://patch-tracking.debian.net/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Mark Shuttleworth wrote: ...snip... Instead of saying there's a bug that was badly handled, so we should never collaborate better on anything, let's look for opportunities to make things better. We have a good opportunity to make a profound change in the way upstreams and distributions engage. A change that will really help the whole free software ecosystem, and many distributions beyond Ubuntu and Debian. Isn't it worth exploring that idea for its full value? Mark Since you used quotation marks, this suggests you are referencing the verbatim words of an individual. I am curious about this quote. Was it a Debian Developer who said this? I find it hard to believe a fellow DD would propose such a shallow view. Your points in this paragraph should enjoy consensus within both the Debian and Ubuntu spheres of influence. A healthy ecosystem will benefit both of us. Richard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Patrick Schoenfeld wrote: Hi, On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 06:40:06PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: THEY STEAL our packages Uarg. That sentence let me discard everything sensible/intelligent you might have said in your mail. I often read sentences like that in the discussion. It makes me sick and wonder if I do invest my time in the right project. Lets face it: If you do make things open source you /must/ and really /should/ accept that others do re-use it according to the license under which you license it. Ubuntu does exactly that. If we start telling that Ubuntu people are thiefs because they re-use our work to make derivative works from it, then we should be consequent and call ourselves thiefs too, because we steal the work of our upstreams. But OTOH it would be just better and easier to not forget what Debian stands for. Free Software. Everytime you might feel its appropriate to tell Ubuntu (or other downstreams) thiefs, it might be worth to hold in a moment and have a look at our Social Contract which you accepted, when you became part of Debian. Yes, but OTOH we strongly support copyleft softwares versus the BSD- like softwares, because we expect to have back the works and because we expect to behave as a big community. I agree with you, it is not thiefs, but anyway the feeling are not so good, especially because we are talking about a big player with enough resources to behave as we do with upstreams. ciao cate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
* Moritz Muehlenhoff j...@inutil.org [2009-08-03 19:30]: Aligning our releases with RHEL rather than with Ubuntu seems more worthwhile to me. They have similar stabilisation lengths as we did for previous releases and they're investing a lot of work into the kernel, from which we could profit immensely. +1 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hi, On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 08:04:12AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote: Yes, but OTOH we strongly support copyleft softwares versus the BSD- like softwares, because we expect to have back the works and because we expect to behave as a big community. I agree with you, it is not thiefs, but anyway the feeling are not so good, especially because we are talking about a big player with enough resources to behave as we do with upstreams. I don't neccessarily want to say, that the bad feeling is not justified. After all I never received a patch for one of my packages from Ubuntu. But I want to make sure, that we stay objective. Of course it would be nicer if patches were reported automatically to us. Yes, that would strengthen the community. But we cannot require it and so we cannot tell that Ubuntu violates anything. Best Regards, Patrick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 09:15:03PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: Bernd Zeimetz be...@bzed.de (03/08/2009): Ack ack ack. I even have the impression that the Canonical employees want to ensure that Debian gets important things much much later than Ubuntu. Obviously false, see how (e)glibc maintainers are pushed by Ubuntu people to get the next release ready, ignoring their own bugs? There are always exceptions to a rule. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 04:13:03PM +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: 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? While never committing to keep any given package in sync with Debian, Ubuntu developers certainly are actively engaged in pushing their changes upstream to Debian. Oh, really? Within the last year I looked at about 20-30 bugfixes/changes which were made in Ubuntu. Here are some statistics (no, I didn't properly count them): 3 of them were reported back to Debian (yay!) - and they were really useful. About 5-10 changes were utter bullshit, like disabling regression tests instead of fixing the real problem when they start failing due to other changes in the distribution. All the others I had to pull from launchpad... Often there were .ubuntu versions introduced, although it would have been easy for the person (DD, member of the right teams) to change these things in Debian and let it migrate to Ubuntu. My proposition was that Ubuntu developers are actively engaged in pushing their changes upstream to Debian. It was *not* that all changes made in Ubuntu are forwarded to the Debian BTS. That you choose to equate the two, and furthermore that you complain about the quality of the changes which were *not* forwarded to Debian (did it not occur to you that the lack of forwarding of ugly hacks might have been a conscious decision?), tells me that you are predisposed to dislike Ubuntu and that you found what you wanted to when looking at Ubuntu changes. Changes that Ubuntu has not submitted to Debian are not proof that Ubuntu is not actively engaging with Debian. Changes that Ubuntu has made that you disapprove of are not proof that Ubuntu is not actively engaging with Debian. Nor is any of this proof that Ubuntu's contributions to Debian are insignificant. I'm sorry that you have a negative impression of Ubuntu's relationship with Debian, but there's plenty of data available that contradicts your conclusion (including BTS reports that have been posted to this very thread). Since you don't appear interested in helping to *improve* Ubuntu's relationship with Debian, I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you about it. I rarely hear anything positive from Ubuntu, except that more and more people who are active in Ubuntu realized that it is much better to do things in Debian directly. Which I'll note you manage to not give Ubuntu credit for here, even though this is also something that's actively encouraged in the Ubuntu community when it's appropriate. shrug -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 04:13:03PM +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: I rarely hear anything positive from Ubuntu, except that more and more people who are active in Ubuntu realized that it is much better to do things in Debian directly. IME the quality of interaction from Ubuntu is very variable and depends strongly on who in Ubuntu looks at the package. For packages which are just getting janatorial cleanup work as a result of having been pulled into universe things tend to be pretty poor, both in terms of the code and in terms of pushing things back into Debian. This often creates a very bad impression. For other things, usually things that are more important within Ubuntu, things tend to be a lot better. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 08:57:50AM +0200, Patrick Schoenfeld wrote: Of course it would be nicer if patches were reported automatically to us. This is by no means a universally held view within Debian. The current approach of only pushing patches to Debian maintainers as manual bug reports is a result of public discussion several years ago on debian-devel (or debian-project), in which a number of developers objected to the idea of receiving automatic mails every time Ubuntu made a change on the grounds that this would generate lots of unwelcome noise. If you prefer to be automatically notified about all changes in Ubuntu, I believe the PTS gives you an option to do this by subscribing to the 'derivatives' keyword. For my part, as a Debian maintainer I greatly prefer receiving bug reports with Ubuntu patches because I find the signal-to-noise is much better when you have a person to talk to instead of trying to extract meaning from a changelog alone. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 11:17:01AM +0100, Steve Langasek wrote: On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 08:57:50AM +0200, Patrick Schoenfeld wrote: Of course it would be nicer if patches were reported automatically to us. This is by no means a universally held view within Debian. The current approach of only pushing patches to Debian maintainers as manual bug reports is a result of public discussion several years ago on debian-devel (or debian-project), in which a number of developers objected to the idea of receiving automatic mails every time Ubuntu made a change on the grounds that this would generate lots of unwelcome noise. If you prefer to be automatically notified about all changes in Ubuntu, I believe the PTS gives you an option to do this by subscribing to the 'derivatives' keyword. For my part, as a Debian maintainer I greatly prefer receiving bug reports with Ubuntu patches because I find the signal-to-noise is much better when you have a person to talk to instead of trying to extract meaning from a changelog alone. I think I misexpressed myself here. What I meant is contrary to us pulling patches manually out of Launchpad or the Ubuntu archive our other Ubuntu sources. It should be called semi-automatically or something like that. Regards, Patrick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Mark Brown wrote: On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 04:13:03PM +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: I rarely hear anything positive from Ubuntu, except that more and more people who are active in Ubuntu realized that it is much better to do things in Debian directly. IME the quality of interaction from Ubuntu is very variable and depends strongly on who in Ubuntu looks at the package. For packages which are just getting janatorial cleanup work as a result of having been pulled into universe things tend to be pretty poor, both in terms of the code and in terms of pushing things back into Debian. This often creates a very bad impression. For other things, usually things that are more important within Ubuntu, things tend to be a lot better. That's true of course, unfortunately there are many more packages which were pulled into universe than packages with an actual maintainer. -- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 08:04:12AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote: Yes, but OTOH we strongly support copyleft softwares versus the BSD- like softwares, because we expect to have back the works and because we expect to behave as a big community. No we don't. Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 05:44:58PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:51:35AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: Also in many cases, Ubuntu and Debian teams can't fully collaborate because they do not target the same upstream version, freezing at the same time should make it possible to achieve this goal. I still see that Ubuntu gets more benefit from that decision. Also, the release team's stunning silence to questions asked about their decisions makes me wonder. I'm a little bothered by the lack of release team involvement in the discussion, but I wonder if the reason isn't simply that it's probably pretty hard for them to pick a way of responding that won't be misinterpreted to fit folks predisposition to argue that Ubuntu are thieves! or everything's always decided behind closed doors! or similar. I don't know of a solution to that, beyond just accepting you'll be misinterpreted and responding anyway. Maybe a stylised debate would work -- ie, pick a couple of people who can debate civilly, randomly assign positions under consideration, and let them make the best arguments they can for those positions, then see what falls out. Basically, just like school debates, though with more points for substance than rhetoric. I'd find that fascinating to follow/participate in, personally. Alternatively, one of the ideas suggested while I was DPL that I didn't end up getting a chance to try was having regular ask the DPL sessions, where anyone can mail in questions, then every couple of weeks the DPL selects a few of them and gives answers. Kind of along the lines of Google Moderator, perhaps. Maybe something like that could be intriguing, anyway. Cheers, aj -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 11:49:09AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: On Tue, Aug 04 2009, Steve Langasek wrote: If you prefer to be automatically notified about all changes in Ubuntu, I believe the PTS gives you an option to do this by subscribing to the 'derivatives' keyword. For my part, as a Debian maintainer I greatly prefer ... Perhaps Ubuntu should correct it's web page, then, in light of the apparent fact that automatic feeding of patches upstream is not in fact reality? They do have the automated sending of patches in place (that's the PTS thing above), though it does require enabling by the recipient too. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 09:15:03PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: Bernd Zeimetz be...@bzed.de (03/08/2009): Ack ack ack. I even have the impression that the Canonical employees want to ensure that Debian gets important things much much later than Ubuntu. Obviously false, see how (e)glibc maintainers are pushed by Ubuntu people to get the next release ready, ignoring their own bugs? And for the ones they can't ignore, forwarding them directly in the Debian BTS, even if they correspond to a version that has never been uploaded to the Debian archive. -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73 aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04 2009, Anthony Towns wrote: I'm a little bothered by the lack of release team involvement in the discussion, but I wonder if the reason isn't simply that it's probably pretty hard for them to pick a way of responding that won't be misinterpreted to fit folks predisposition to argue that Ubuntu are thieves! or everything's always decided behind closed doors! or similar. I am afraid I do not see how participating in the discussion will fuel the paranoia of folks that everything's always decided behind closed doors! part. They can always point out how any of the proposals being bruited will impact actual releases, or help iron out impracticalities in suggestions (not every thing need be shot down out of hand [yes, yes, I know, that's what I often do]) manoj -- When all else fails, read the instructions. Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 09:28:18PM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote: On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 09:15:03PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: Bernd Zeimetz be...@bzed.de (03/08/2009): Ack ack ack. I even have the impression that the Canonical employees want to ensure that Debian gets important things much much later than Ubuntu. Obviously false, see how (e)glibc maintainers are pushed by Ubuntu people to get the next release ready, ignoring their own bugs? And for the ones they can't ignore, forwarding them directly in the Debian BTS, even if they correspond to a version that has never been uploaded to the Debian archive. And to the upstream BTS, mentioning both Ubuntu and Debian bugs. -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73 aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 10:29:11AM +0100, Steve Langasek wrote: I'm sorry that you have a negative impression of Ubuntu's relationship with Debian, but there's plenty of data available that contradicts your conclusion (including BTS reports that have been posted to this very thread). The problem is there is also plenty of data, like for example the recent #539950 (on a package never uploaded to Debian) which is looking a _lot_ like LP#408901. In this bug, the Ubuntu developer is (IMHO) trying to make the Debian one find, fix and patch the bug for him. The problem is (as a DD) that I would expect Ubuntu to collaborate the most on the harder core packages, meaning the toolchain, the kernel, X... Alas, it happens more coincidentally than on a regular basis, and that saddens me. I'm not saying there aren't any working cases of cooperation, and I welcome them. But there are way too many example of bad (or rather inexistant) cooperation, or even dirty tricks like #539950, which undermines the former tries a lot. -- Intersec http://www.intersec.com Pierre Habouzit pierre.habou...@intersec.com Tél : +33 (0)1 5570 3346 Mob : +33 (0)6 1636 8131 Fax : +33 (0)1 5570 3332 37 Rue Pierre Lhomme 92400 Courbevoie signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Teemu Likonen wrote: On 2009-07-30 13:12 (+0200), Sven Joachim wrote: On 2009-07-30 11:36 +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Oh, and Debian got hundreds of active developers, and I doubt they'll be running to Shuttleworth anytime soon. Probably not, but the release synchronization with Ubuntu may make them feel that they are working for him, which can be a great demotivation. That's why it would be interesting to hear some concrete ideas how useful this would be for the parties. How pros and cons balance? I'll start: Ubuntu == + Ubuntu always gets a frozen and pretty stable system even if they don't communicate at all with Debian. (This is just a mind exercise, I'm sure there is some collaboration.) + Better-quality LTS releases. Happier users and customers. + More collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers and teams. Are you sure? I doubt that more collaboration would happen. Debian would be forced to have their stuff in a better shape at the day when Ubuntu freezes and they'd just take it... Debian == + More collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers and teams. See above. - Debian developers may feel that it's Ubuntu which they are working for in the end. Possibly with the feeling that some of the decision-making escapes the Debian developer community. Can be demotivating. - OK, Ubuntu x.04 was released in April but because of their lower quality standards and the 6-month release cycle they most likely won't be helping Debian to fix the rest of the difficult RC bugs. They are already working on their next 6-month period. Ubuntu gets a lot of publicity because of the release but Debian always comes too late, literally always after Ubuntu. (It's worth the wait for many people but the possible negative publicity can be demotivating for Debian community.) A couple of months later eventually the RC bugs are fixed in Debian and there is a release. Ubuntu will apply some of the bug fixes to their LTS x.y.1 releases (3-month point release cycle). This can make some Debian developers feel that Ubuntu gets something for free again without contributing back. Can be demotivating. + Debian's quality probably won't decrease (except for Squeeze maybe). That's not a plus. That is what one would expect. A plus would be to have a better quality. + [Please invent more concrete benefits for Debian developers and users.] Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic. After all what do I know? I'm not a Debian developer, just a user. Thanks you, all developers! :-) -- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Steve Langasek wrote: 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? While never committing to keep any given package in sync with Debian, Ubuntu developers certainly are actively engaged in pushing their changes upstream to Debian. Oh, really? Within the last year I looked at about 20-30 bugfixes/changes which were made in Ubuntu. Here are some statistics (no, I didn't properly count them): 3 of them were reported back to Debian (yay!) - and they were really useful. About 5-10 changes were utter bullshit, like disabling regression tests instead of fixing the real problem when they start failing due to other changes in the distribution. All the others I had to pull from launchpad... Often there were .ubuntu versions introduced, although it would have been easy for the person (DD, member of the right teams) to change these things in Debian and let it migrate to Ubuntu. I rarely hear anything positive from Ubuntu, except that more and more people who are active in Ubuntu realized that it is much better to do things in Debian directly. -- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 17:55, Anthony Townsa...@master.debian.org wrote: Given the freeze-timeline proposed it could/should be. Ubuntu has its DebianImportFreeze for karmic scheduled for June 25th; which should translate for an LTS import freeze on December 25th-ish, shortly after the Debian freeze begins. At that point, the vast majority of universe packages in Ubuntu LTS should exactly match the Debian version, and Debian will disallow uploads that don't fix RC bugs, which should allow Ubuntu to remain synced with very little review, until Debian releases, at which point security updates issued by Debian should also apply to Ubuntu. and many other similar comments/statements, I just take this as example because it's the most recent one What I'm wondering is: why should *we* adapt to ubuntu? why was not ubuntu in the first place to accommodate our plans, instead of the other way around? Why was not ubuntu that proposed we freeze when Debian freeze but the opposite or so? since when upstreams make their plans on downstreams? We receive nothing (or very near to) from Ubuntu; they *do not give us back*, why should we schedule to follow on their needs? Their changes (when they are worth to be applied in Debian too) are quite never given back, and the debian maint has to go and extract the relevant patch from the usual mess they do on their packages. They do not collaborate with us to do changes in Debian first and then have them for free in ubuntu, and the successful collaborations I've seen (mainly in the python area) are just *exceptions* and not the rule (as it should be). What are my feelings to the whole story? we're trying to make ubuntu LTS easier, because WE PREPARE the release, THEY STEAL our packages while WE keep improving (fixing bugs and so), THEY do THEIR OWN changes to target their goals, and we receive quite *NOTHING* in return. We do the work, they make the money selling LTS to customers. There was never collaboration between ubuntu and us, how would this make things changing? at least are they publicly making any statement about actively providing support to debian to make this experiment something where we are both winning or not? I don't think I'm the only one seeing this not as positive as we want to pretend, and while it's quite pessimistic, I don't foresee a different outcome. Regards, -- Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu) My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/ Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
[ Please note that I'm taking all my hats off for this post, especially ] [ debian-release ones. ] On 2009-08-03, Sandro Tosi mo...@debian.org wrote: What I'm wondering is: why should *we* adapt to ubuntu? why was not ubuntu in the first place to accommodate our plans, instead of the other way around? Why was not ubuntu that proposed we freeze when Debian freeze but the opposite or so? since when upstreams make their plans on downstreams? Well, there is a certain hope that upstreams above Debian would also adapt at some point. We receive nothing (or very near to) from Ubuntu; they *do not give us back*, why should we schedule to follow on their needs? I guess you already know it, but just in case you don't: * http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=origin-ubuntu;users=ubuntu-de...@lists.ubuntu.com * http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=ubuntu-patch;users=ubuntu-de...@lists.ubuntu.com But of course it could be more. Especially contributions from Canonical employees doing stuff in main. (Some a tad neglecting their packages in Debian IMHO...) Their changes (when they are worth to be applied in Debian too) are quite never given back, and the debian maint has to go and extract the relevant patch from the usual mess they do on their packages. True. However the use of a patch system is extremly encouraged in Ubuntu. So maybe you want to point us to such messes where the bug actually makes sense to pull back into Debian. (There are quite some deltas in Ubuntu because of Ubuntu-local changes, with the introduction of dpkg-vendor they could of course be reduced again.) They do not collaborate with us to do changes in Debian first and then have them for free in ubuntu, and the successful collaborations I've seen (mainly in the python area) are just *exceptions* and not the rule (as it should be). True. However sometimes I'd like to see Debian to move more quickly too. But it doesn't seem easy to me. What are my feelings to the whole story? we're trying to make ubuntu LTS easier, because WE PREPARE the release, THEY STEAL our packages while WE keep improving (fixing bugs and so), THEY do THEIR OWN changes to target their goals, and we receive quite *NOTHING* in return. We do the work, they make the money selling LTS to customers. I wouldn't reduce this to the selling point, the main question is what this costs us in terms of users of Debian's stable release. However main is only a tiny subset that's supported security-wise and everything else is as best-effort as in Debian. (I thought I could raise exim4 vs. postfix but it seems that exim4 is in main in Ubuntu, damn it ;-) There was never collaboration between ubuntu and us, how would this make things changing? at least are they publicly making any statement about actively providing support to debian to make this experiment something where we are both winning or not? Never ever! Nevermind teams like clamav that try it. *sigh* Kind regards, Philipp Kern -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-30, Teemu Likonen tliko...@iki.fi wrote: On 2009-07-30 13:12 (+0200), Sven Joachim wrote: On 2009-07-30 11:36 +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Oh, and Debian got hundreds of active developers, and I doubt they'll be running to Shuttleworth anytime soon. Probably not, but the release synchronization with Ubuntu may make them feel that they are working for him, which can be a great demotivation. That's why it would be interesting to hear some concrete ideas how useful this would be for the parties. How pros and cons balance? I'll start: Aligning our releases with RHEL rather than with Ubuntu seems more worthwhile to me. They have similar stabilisation lengths as we did for previous releases and they're investing a lot of work into the kernel, from which we could profit immensely. Cheers, Moritz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hi, On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 06:40:06PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: THEY STEAL our packages Uarg. That sentence let me discard everything sensible/intelligent you might have said in your mail. I often read sentences like that in the discussion. It makes me sick and wonder if I do invest my time in the right project. Lets face it: If you do make things open source you /must/ and really /should/ accept that others do re-use it according to the license under which you license it. Ubuntu does exactly that. If we start telling that Ubuntu people are thiefs because they re-use our work to make derivative works from it, then we should be consequent and call ourselves thiefs too, because we steal the work of our upstreams. But OTOH it would be just better and easier to not forget what Debian stands for. Free Software. Everytime you might feel its appropriate to tell Ubuntu (or other downstreams) thiefs, it might be worth to hold in a moment and have a look at our Social Contract which you accepted, when you became part of Debian. Sad and sick, Patrick signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote: On 2009-07-30, Teemu Likonen tliko...@iki.fi wrote: On 2009-07-30 13:12 (+0200), Sven Joachim wrote: On 2009-07-30 11:36 +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Oh, and Debian got hundreds of active developers, and I doubt they'll be running to Shuttleworth anytime soon. Probably not, but the release synchronization with Ubuntu may make them feel that they are working for him, which can be a great demotivation. That's why it would be interesting to hear some concrete ideas how useful this would be for the parties. How pros and cons balance? I'll start: Aligning our releases with RHEL rather than with Ubuntu seems more worthwhile to me. They have similar stabilisation lengths as we did for previous releases and they're investing a lot of work into the kernel, from which we could profit immensely. Ack. Or at least Fedora. -- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Philipp Kern wrote: But of course it could be more. Especially contributions from Canonical employees doing stuff in main. (Some a tad neglecting their packages in Debian IMHO...) Ack ack ack. I even have the impression that the Canonical employees want to ensure that Debian gets important things much much later than Ubuntu. -- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03 2009, Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote: Aligning our releases with RHEL rather than with Ubuntu seems more worthwhile to me. They have similar stabilisation lengths as we did for previous releases and they're investing a lot of work into the kernel, from which we could profit immensely. Now that's a thought. This would also help with SELinux, since we would freeze with a tested and polished releawse-ready version of SELinux userland and policies. So, I would say that sync'ing with a peer distribution makes way more sense than sync'ing with a Debian derivative. manoj -- Just because he's dead is no reason to lay off work. Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03 2009, Philipp Kern wrote: [ Please note that I'm taking all my hats off for this post, especially ] [ debian-release ones. ] On 2009-08-03, Sandro Tosi mo...@debian.org wrote: What I'm wondering is: why should *we* adapt to ubuntu? why was not ubuntu in the first place to accommodate our plans, instead of the other way around? Why was not ubuntu that proposed we freeze when Debian freeze but the opposite or so? since when upstreams make their plans on downstreams? Well, there is a certain hope that upstreams above Debian would also adapt at some point. They are far more likely to adapt, I would think, if Debian sync's with RHEL, rather than Debian sync'ing with a Debian derivative. manoj -- If you mess with a thing long enough, it'll break. Schmidt Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Bernd Zeimetz be...@bzed.de (03/08/2009): Ack ack ack. I even have the impression that the Canonical employees want to ensure that Debian gets important things much much later than Ubuntu. Obviously false, see how (e)glibc maintainers are pushed by Ubuntu people to get the next release ready, ignoring their own bugs? Mraw, KiBi. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 20:07, Patrick Schoenfeldschoenf...@debian.org wrote: Hi, On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 06:40:06PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: THEY STEAL our packages Uarg. That sentence let me discard everything sensible/intelligent you might have said in your mail. I often read sentences like that in the discussion. the mail was (intentionally) quite extremist, but it's not that far away from: taking everything giving back very *very* few. It makes me sick and wonder if I do invest my time in the right project. Lets face it: If you do make things open source you /must/ and really /should/ accept that others do re-use it according to the license under which you license it. Ubuntu does exactly that. Sure, sadly they spread all over the world, from the very beginning, We give back. Well, it's not happening. Either they should stop saying lies, or (the preferred solution) they need to start respecting their promises. If we start telling that Ubuntu people are thiefs because they re-use our work to make derivative works from it, then we should be consequent and call ourselves thiefs too, because we steal the work of our upstreams. Hey, but we give back (patches, improvements, bug reports) to upstreams :) But OTOH it would be just better and easier to not forget what Debian stands for. Free Software. Everytime you might feel its appropriate to tell Ubuntu (or other downstreams) thiefs, it might be worth to hold in a moment and have a look at our Social Contract which you accepted, when you became part of Debian. It's not about licenses, legal or what, it's about honesty. If you promise to give back, you should do it. Noone have forced them to promise that, and noone will force them to stick to their promises, but when I give my word I do my best to maintain it. Maybe it's only me... Regards, -- Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu) My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/ Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 09:34:39PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 06:40:06PM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote: THEY STEAL our packages Uarg. That sentence let me discard everything sensible/intelligent you might have said in your mail. I often read sentences like that in the discussion. the mail was (intentionally) quite extremist, but it's not that far away from: taking everything giving back very *very* few. Your mails in this thread tend to be extremist. Maybe it would help the discussions to calm down a bit and try to stay objective? It makes me sick and wonder if I do invest my time in the right project. Lets face it: If you do make things open source you /must/ and really /should/ accept that others do re-use it according to the license under which you license it. Ubuntu does exactly that. Sure, sadly they spread all over the world, from the very beginning, We give back. Well, it's not happening. Either they should stop saying lies, or (the preferred solution) they need to start respecting their promises. That is simply not true. It might be that Ubuntu doesn't give back as much as Debian would like. It might also be that Debian doesn't like what it gives back. Still, this does not give you the right to call the people working on Ubuntu liers or thiefs. You don't seem to have a proper fundament to base that criminations on, so you should not do them in the first place. Apart from this: Giving back in the form Debian would like to have it, is not an obligatory part of open source. You have to publish what you do, yeah, but what you are trying to say is that you'd like Ubuntu to send their patches in an easy consumable form, e.g. requiring Ubuntu to send their patches to our BTS. But this is like upstreams requiring to send you a postcard: non-free. If we start telling that Ubuntu people are thiefs because they re-use our work to make derivative works from it, then we should be consequent and call ourselves thiefs too, because we steal the work of our upstreams. Hey, but we give back (patches, improvements, bug reports) to upstreams :) Well, in every cosm there are good sheep and bad sheep. Some of us forward their patches upstream, some don't. Some produce patches that are ready for inclusion for upstream, some don't. What I am trying to say: After all we as the people that make up Debian are sitting in the glasshouse. We also have maintainers who do not properly send there patches upstream. We also have patches that are Debian-specific like Ubuntu has patches that are Ubuntu-specific. There are also reports from Ubuntu developers and contributors in our bugtracker. But OTOH it would be just better and easier to not forget what Debian stands for. Free Software. Everytime you might feel its appropriate to tell Ubuntu (or other downstreams) thiefs, it might be worth to hold in a moment and have a look at our Social Contract which you accepted, when you became part of Debian. It's not about licenses, legal or what, it's about honesty. If you promise to give back, you should do it. Noone have forced them to promise that, and noone will force them to stick to their promises, but when I give my word I do my best to maintain it. Maybe it's only me... Well, discrimating other people is not really about honesty. Best Regards, Patrick signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Patrick Schoenfeld schoenf...@debian.org (03/08/2009): That is simply not true. It might be that Ubuntu doesn't give back as much as Debian would like. Or “as they pretend to” [1]: | When a bug is reported in the Debian bug tracking system and then later | fixed in Ubuntu, the fixes are often automatically communicated back | directly to the debian bug system. Patches are also published | automatically on patches.ubuntu.com. The long term goal of that work is | to ensure that patches made by the full-time Ubuntu team members are | immediately also included in debian packages where the debian maintainer | likes the work. 1. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/Debian That might be the point of various people out here, not necessarily mine. (It might be that Ubuntu doesn't fix that many bugs, too.) Mraw, KiBi. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 08:42:54AM +0200, Frans Pop wrote: On Friday 31 July 2009, Steve Langasek wrote: I don't believe the kind of coarse synchronization that's been proposed for the releases would make Debian-Ubuntu crossgrades significantly easier. Most of the local changes that Ubuntu has today would still apply, and there are rebuilt binaries that share version numbers, introducing all kinds of fun possibilities. paranoid Right. So Ubuntu can put its paid developers to work to create a tested upgrade path from Debian to Ubuntu and Ubuntu can go off with its publicity budget and promote itself with that feature. How fun. I see zero benefit for Debian there. /paranoid Did you somehow read my comment in the opposite sense, or is this a very special kind of paranoia indeed to conclude that Canonical is going to invest extraordinary amounts of engineering effort for the express purpose of stealing Debian users, and this only once the releases are in sync, when arguably this would have been equally feasible at any previous point? -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 04:31:56PM +, Philipp Kern wrote: On 2009-07-30, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: You seem to have been operating under a misconception that the *majority* of packages in Ubuntu have been touched wrt Debian. They have not - the vast majority of packages in Ubuntu are unmodified Debian packages, as shown by the graphs on the bottom of https://merges.ubuntu.com/main.html and https://merges.ubuntu.com/universe.html - which is for the best given the relative number of developers working on each project. I don't think it holds true for main, though. Unless I'm misreading the graphs. Of course it applies to universe where Ubuntu is heavily relying on Debian to do the work. Well, most of the 'local' packages on the graph for main are actually language packs, so I don't think it makes much sense to count those anyway. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Wed, Jul 29 2009, Stephen Frost wrote: * Sune Vuorela (nos...@vuorela.dk) wrote: I'm hoping that we can convince the release team to change their mind. I doubt you can, and I hope you don't. It could have been announced better, but in general I think it's a good thing for Debian. Please get over how it was announced. Well, yes and no. I think a freeze every two years is a good idea. I just do not think that we should freeze in 5 months or so. manoj Well, I think Manoj is right here. Freezing in ~5 months would effectively delay or cancel several innovations within Debian which has been planned and worked in for several months before. It is just a too short as a timeframe for such a giant mass like Debian to manoeuvre towards a freeze with two new kfreebsd ports recently taken on board. -- God is real, unless declared integer. Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Friday 31 July 2009, Steve Langasek wrote: I don't believe the kind of coarse synchronization that's been proposed for the releases would make Debian-Ubuntu crossgrades significantly easier. Most of the local changes that Ubuntu has today would still apply, and there are rebuilt binaries that share version numbers, introducing all kinds of fun possibilities. paranoid Right. So Ubuntu can put its paid developers to work to create a tested upgrade path from Debian to Ubuntu and Ubuntu can go off with its publicity budget and promote itself with that feature. How fun. I see zero benefit for Debian there. /paranoid -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-29, Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org wrote: So the developers are then within their rights to ignore the short first freeze, and work to release whenever the packages are really ready. Uh, that's what a subset of them always did, no? Like starting transitions during freezes with no coordination? Been there, done that, thank you. Well, or not fixing RC bugs during the freeze at all but complaining that the freeze is taking so long and hurts unstable. Kind regards, Philipp Kern -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-30, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: You seem to have been operating under a misconception that the *majority* of packages in Ubuntu have been touched wrt Debian. They have not - the vast majority of packages in Ubuntu are unmodified Debian packages, as shown by the graphs on the bottom of https://merges.ubuntu.com/main.html and https://merges.ubuntu.com/universe.html - which is for the best given the relative number of developers working on each project. I don't think it holds true for main, though. Unless I'm misreading the graphs. Of course it applies to universe where Ubuntu is heavily relying on Debian to do the work. But it's only main that's officially supported (even security-wise) anyway. Kind regards, Philipp Kern -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
There seem to be two quite different models about how synchronisation of Debian and Ubuntu LTS is intended to work. I believe it would be very helpful to know if there is any agreement with Ubuntu about this. The two models as I can see them from the discussion so far: Model 1: Debian freezes in December Debian developers concentrate on fixing RC bugs Ubuntu developers concentrate on including newer versions of major software packages When the number of RC bugs in Debian is low enough Ubuntu freezes Ubuntu and Debian release at approximately the same time With this model Debian developers will bear the main burden of bug fixing while Ubuntu will use the time to integrate newer software packages. Model 2: Debian and Ubuntu freeze at the same time (December?) Debian and Ubuntu developers coordinate in fixing RC bugs Debian and Ubuntu release at about the same time With this model the burden is shared and both operating system will be at the same state with respect to the main components. Differences will be according to different philosophy (questions asked by the installer, components and configuration of a standard installation, what is user friendly). There may be also differences in the versions of main software packages, but this differences would be clear at freeze time and due to different philosophy. While I think model 2 could prove useful for Debian and Ubuntu I can't see what Debian would gain from model 1. I believe this discussion would look very different if Ubuntu says it agrees on model 2. Werner Baumann -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Why not freeze in June 2010 instead of December 2009 and then freeze again in December 2011*? Mark Shuttleworth seems (at least seemed) to be fine with delaying Ubuntu LTS by half a year to get Ubuntu and Debian in sync [1]: | The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on the conversation that | is going on right now between Debian and Ubuntu. Besides having more time to make Squeeze a great Debian release, one could also revisit the need to support skip-upgrades if the freeze would be postponed. In his blog Lucas highlights the similarity between the next Ubuntu LTS and the next Debian release, but he also points out the need to differentiate us from Ubuntu. This sounds contrary. He also asks how we are relevant but does not give an answer [2]: | after the releases (both Ubuntu’s and Debian’s), users will get to | choose between two very similar distributions. We need to think about | how Debian will differenciate itself from Ubuntu: what should we | emphasize? How are we relevant? I hope he does not want to imply that we should let Ubuntu release for us anytime in the future. Some pros and cons of such a step have already been discussed in our wiki years ago [3]. Carsten * Or freeze again in December 2012 if one and a half year is not enough time between two Ubuntu LTS releases. [1] http://derstandard.at/fs/1246541995003/Interview-Shuttleworth-about-GNOME-30---Whats-good-whats-missing-what-needs-work [2] http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=375 [3] http://wiki.debian.org/LetUbuntuReleaseForUs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:28:52PM -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote: I also believe that December freeze is quite difficult for all parts involved. Another team that will have bigger problems is the security team but it is not yet clear how they will manage to support an extra release. Actually, the security team will probably have a hard time during the one-shot we allow skipping squeeze phase, but afterwards they will probably profit from being just a little behind Ubuntu. The rest of Debian won't. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hi, On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 08:45:41AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote: Why not freeze in June 2010 instead of December 2009 and then freeze again in December 2011*? Mark Shuttleworth seems (at least seemed) to be fine with delaying Ubuntu LTS by half a year to get Ubuntu and Debian in sync [1]: | The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on the conversation that | is going on right now between Debian and Ubuntu. I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thursday 30 July 2009, Marc Haber wrote: I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. +1 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
* Marc Haber mh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de [2009-07-30 09:16]: I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. Couldn't have it phrased better. +1 Yours Martin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 09:16, Marc Habermh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 08:45:41AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote: Why not freeze in June 2010 instead of December 2009 and then freeze again in December 2011*? Mark Shuttleworth seems (at least seemed) to be fine with delaying Ubuntu LTS by half a year to get Ubuntu and Debian in sync [1]: | The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on the conversation that | is going on right now between Debian and Ubuntu. I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. Absolutely +1 -- Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu) My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/ Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:16 AM, Marc Habermh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 08:45:41AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote: Why not freeze in June 2010 instead of December 2009 and then freeze again in December 2011*? Mark Shuttleworth seems (at least seemed) to be fine with delaying Ubuntu LTS by half a year to get Ubuntu and Debian in sync [1]: | The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on the conversation that | is going on right now between Debian and Ubuntu. I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. I don't get why do you consider 18-to-24-month release cycles a desirable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. Is this just to stay out of sync with another deb-based distro? We are definitely not only major supplier to any other deb-based distro, and you act our end customers are really happy with not even knowing the date when we will freeze to our next release. Could you please also point out why that's bad to a set of our end customers? regards, -- Gustavo stratus Franco -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:58:30AM -0700, Gustavo Franco wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:16 AM, Marc Habermh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 08:45:41AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote: Why not freeze in June 2010 instead of December 2009 and then freeze again in December 2011*? Mark Shuttleworth seems (at least seemed) to be fine with delaying Ubuntu LTS by half a year to get Ubuntu and Debian in sync [1]: | The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on the conversation that | is going on right now between Debian and Ubuntu. I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. I don't get why do you consider 18-to-24-month release cycles a desirable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. Is this just to stay out of sync with another deb-based distro? If we work _this_ hard to allow Ubuntu to get their LTS releases in sync with out stable releases in a way that allows Ubuntu to get a later KDE _and_ a later GNOME[1], things are running in the wrong direction. Why continue releasing stable in the first place then? We could freeze in December, thus missing both KDE and GNOME, and unfreeze when Ubuntu has detached itself before their release. Nobody would even think about using Debian stable when there is Ubuntu LTS with more recent software _and_ commercial support by its vendor available. That way, Debian would deteriorate into what OpenSUSE is for SLES and what Fedora is for RHEL - the technical playground for the unpaid developers who iron out the kinks from what will be the basis of the commercial release. I don't think that this is desireable. We are definitely not only major supplier to any other deb-based distro, Yes, currently. With the new release schedule, we will be. and you act our end customers are really happy with not even knowing the date when we will freeze to our next release. I do not think that we were too late with announcing our freezes in the past. What we did in the past was just fine, and I was very satisfied with the way etch and lenny were released. No need to change the system which we _FINALLY_ got running. At least we do not need to change if there is no advantage for us, only for our competitors. Greetings Marc [1] Assuming that KDE continues releasing Januar and July and GNOME continues releasing March and September -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Marc Haber wrote: In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. I don't mind who changes the date for the other but I really don't agree that doing it is only for Ubuntu's advantage. Nobody in Debian would have taken such a decision, we are Debian developers and have no interest in helping only Ubuntu. What we're speaking of is synergy between both distributions. You know the it's the principle behind “the combination of both is worth more that the sum of individual parts”. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. The synchronization with Ubuntu is not going to remove our identity. We'll keep our user base and the possible improvements in both distributions will help us do better in the competition with other operating systems (proprietary or not). Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:37, Raphael Hertzoghert...@debian.org wrote: On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Marc Haber wrote: In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. I don't mind who changes the date for the other but I really don't agree that doing it is only for Ubuntu's advantage. Nobody in Debian would have taken such a decision, we are Debian developers and have no interest in helping only Ubuntu. What we're speaking of is synergy between both distributions. You know the it's the principle behind “the combination of both is worth more that the sum of individual parts”. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. The synchronization with Ubuntu is not going to remove our identity. We'll keep our user base and the possible improvements in both distributions will help us do better in the competition with other operating systems (proprietary or not). Cheers, Me wholly agrees. Adding to that, the mighty Ian Murdock once stated that if Ubuntu wins, then Debian wins, that Ubuntu is like a variety of Debian. Ubuntu has got their market which Debian failed to capture anyways (desktop), so if they keep honouring publicly stating and recognizing Debian as their upstream, so much the better, why not. And Ubuntu will keep growing whether Debian co-operates or not by the way, cuz their leadership is damn solid. There's some (many) of us who feel that the great Debian culture is irreplaceable, and therefore won't use Ubuntu as their primary OS. So why worry about losing relevance. -- my place on the web: floss-and-misc.blogspot.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:37:46AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Marc Haber wrote: In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. I don't mind who changes the date for the other but I really don't agree that doing it is only for Ubuntu's advantage. Nobody in Debian would have taken such a decision, we are Debian developers and have no interest in helping only Ubuntu. I don't see the advantage for Debian short of probable ease of work for the security team (which doesn't seem to have commented yet). What we're speaking of is synergy between both distributions. You know the it's the principle behind “the combination of both is worth more that the sum of individual parts”. What kind of synergy could Debian get from Ubuntu which it couldn't get in the past? I surely haven't seen any in the past. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. The synchronization with Ubuntu is not going to remove our identity. It is going to harm our identiy. We'll keep our user base That's what I doubt. Ubuntu LTS will be better than Debian stable in all aspects, why should anybody continue using Debian stable? and the possible improvements in both distributions will help us do better in the competition with other operating systems Which improvements could Debian get from Ubuntu? An installer that doesn't ask any questions, or non-free proprietary (graphics) drivers? Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:59:05AM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: so if they keep honouring publicly stating and recognizing Debian as their upstream, google, debian site:ubuntu.com delivers _one_ hit that is actually inside ubuntu.com. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 09:16:26AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what
Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try
hard to make it look like that.
In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to
accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync
with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours.
No. I personally couldn't care less about what Mark and/or Ubuntu
want for their releases and corresponding release times.
*BUT*
I'm de facto already synchronizing with specific people working on
Ubuntu packages derived from packages I maintain in Debian. For
instance, that happens in the OCaml team (maintainer for about 100
source packages): after various years of completely rotten and often
unusable OCaml libraries in Ubuntu, now there is someone on the Ubuntu
side which cares about them and work with us. That's good, they sync
with the OCaml team periodically and contribute back patches.
The state of the art is that, to keep the advantages of collaboration,
I'm interested in satisfying requests like « can you please be
stable at DDMMYYY so that we can synchronize? ». According to the
release team plan I will need to do that a bit less frequently and I
like the idea.
Sure, I'm _scared_ like everybody else about having a freeze coming up
a few months after the summer. And hey, we have also ongoing very big
changes in all OCaml packages (basically we have completely changed
the dependency scheme and switched to automatic dependency
computation).
Still, my current attitude is « hey, let's try if we can do that, if
we can it will be really cool ».
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: There's some (many) of us who feel that the great Debian culture is irreplaceable, and therefore won't use Ubuntu as their primary OS. So why worry about losing relevance. Because if you lose relevance, you lose users (might them be individuals on the desktop or corporate entities on the server). When you lose users you lose contributors and you finally lose developers. In the end, the momentum (sic) slows down and you die. It *might* be that losing relevance on the desktop side is of little importance (which I believe it is _not_), but if corporate entities turn to use Ubuntu LTS because insert a bunch of valuable reasons instead of Debian stable, I fail to see how developers from these corporate entities will contribute to Debian and not to Ubuntu. A distribution without users is just worth nothing, no matter how irreplaceable its culture might be. In the end, synchronising Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS freezes will only make Debian stable appear as weaker (no commercial support, older software, not-so-greater stability, no longer support, less fancy) than Ubuntu LTS. Why would _anybody_ reasonable (and outside of the cultural thing) choose Debian stable over Ubuntu LTS ? Regards, OdyX -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:11, Marc Habermh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:59:05AM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: so if they keep honouring publicly stating and recognizing Debian as their upstream, google, debian site:ubuntu.com delivers _one_ hit that is actually inside ubuntu.com. Greetings Marc debian site:www.ubuntu.com gives me over a hundred -- my place on the web: floss-and-misc.blogspot.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:11:12AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
google, debian site:ubuntu.com delivers _one_ hit that is actually
inside ubuntu.com.
Search better: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian .
The page is one link away from the main Ubuntu site (follow
philosophy).
FWIW, that page has been added, rather quickly, after a precise
requests of ours, the history is available at
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/10/debian_on_ubuntu_com_just_a_bug/
Bottom line: I have no particular problem with Ubuntu bashing, but
please get the facts right.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:28:09AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: On 30/07/09 at 11:17 +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: It *might* be that losing relevance on the desktop side is of little importance (which I believe it is _not_), but if corporate entities turn to use Ubuntu LTS because insert a bunch of valuable reasons instead of Debian stable, I fail to see how developers from these corporate entities will contribute to Debian and not to Ubuntu. Seriously, do we just fear that synchronizing with Ubuntu will instantly remove all good reasons to use Debian? I'm a bit shocked that Debian developers seem to take for granted that the next Ubuntu LTS will be of better quality than Debian. That depends on what you define as better quality. Ubuntu LTS will definetely look better than Debian in magazine tests (because the installer looks better, doesn't ask any confusing questions and immediately delivers a graphical desktop on the nVidia graphics card that the test box has) and at distrowatch and its clones because it has more current KDE and GNOME, and probably a later kernel. In the end, synchronising Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS freezes will only make Debian stable appear as weaker (no commercial support, older software, not-so-greater stability, no longer support, less fancy) than Ubuntu LTS. Why would _anybody_ reasonable (and outside of the cultural thing) choose Debian stable over Ubuntu LTS ? If we can't provide an answer to that question, maybe we should make Debian a derivative distribution of Ubuntu? :-) That's what we have just made a huge step towards. I mean, Mark Shuttleworth already takes vital decisions for Debian and talks about them to the press before Debian even knows. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:28:01AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:11:12AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote: google, debian site:ubuntu.com delivers _one_ hit that is actually inside ubuntu.com. Search better: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian . That's the one hit I was refering to. FWIW, that page has been added, rather quickly, after a precise requests of ours, the history is available at http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/10/debian_on_ubuntu_com_just_a_bug/ So that page wasn't even their idea. Bottom line: I have no particular problem with Ubuntu bashing, but please get the facts right. I do. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:17, Didier 'OdyX' Rabouddid...@raboud.com wrote: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: There's some (many) of us who feel that the great Debian culture is irreplaceable, and therefore won't use Ubuntu as their primary OS. So why worry about losing relevance. Because if you lose relevance, you lose users (might them be individuals on the desktop or corporate entities on the server). When you lose users you lose contributors and you finally lose developers. In the end, the momentum (sic) slows down and you die. It *might* be that losing relevance on the desktop side is of little importance (which I believe it is _not_), but if corporate entities turn to use Ubuntu LTS because insert a bunch of valuable reasons instead of Debian stable, I fail to see how developers from these corporate entities will contribute to Debian and not to Ubuntu. A distribution without users is just worth nothing, no matter how irreplaceable its culture might be. In the end, synchronising Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS freezes will only make Debian stable appear as weaker (no commercial support, older software, not-so-greater stability, no longer support, less fancy) than Ubuntu LTS. Why would _anybody_ reasonable (and outside of the cultural thing) choose Debian stable over Ubuntu LTS ? You make some strong points here, but how is non-cooperation helping Debian? Debian releases are often behind Ubuntu upstream versions anyways (GNOME, KDE, Linux), so how did that help Debian? If Ubuntu benefits more than Debian, so what. Aren't we in this together? It's like stiffling progress in order to try remain relevant, and isn't that what non-free software vendors do? Oh, and Debian got hundreds of active developers, and I doubt they'll be running to Shuttleworth anytime soon. That's part of the irreplaceable culture that will ensure Debian's continued existence. -- my place on the web: floss-and-misc.blogspot.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:07:58AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote: We'll keep our user base That's what I doubt. Ubuntu LTS will be better than Debian stable in all aspects, why should anybody continue using Debian stable? You believe that Debian, releasing with approximately the same set of packages as an Ubuntu LTS but with a requirement to only release when ready instead of releasing on a fixed schedule as Ubuntu LTS will, offers no relevant differentiation at all for users? Doesn't this imply that everyone who continues using Debian today does so merely as an accident of the release schedule and the particular set of packages that land in a given Debian release? OTOH, perhaps you're saying that you think that the proposed sychronization will be successful, and as a result Ubuntu's quality will come up, eliminating a key differentiator between the two at present? and the possible improvements in both distributions will help us do better in the competition with other operating systems Which improvements could Debian get from Ubuntu? An installer that doesn't ask any questions, or non-free proprietary (graphics) drivers? 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? While never committing to keep any given package in sync with Debian, Ubuntu developers certainly are actively engaged in pushing their changes upstream to Debian. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Marc Haber wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:37:46AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: What we're speaking of is synergy between both distributions. You know the it's the principle behind “the combination of both is worth more that the sum of individual parts”. What kind of synergy could Debian get from Ubuntu which it couldn't get in the past? I surely haven't seen any in the past. As you might have noticed, Ubuntu is used by lots of people and they start having some influence on upstream projects. Those projects do some effort to ensure that Ubuntu has a good version of their software (sometimes by using a version that does not come from Debian sid). If Ubuntu and Debian used the same version, the incentive would be even bigger to publish a really good version because it's going to be used very widely in the next 3 years. Also in many cases, Ubuntu and Debian teams can't fully collaborate because they do not target the same upstream version, freezing at the same time should make it possible to achieve this goal. There are certainly challenges to turn this possibility in a reality but if we don't do the efforts to even make it possible, we're sure to get nothing out of what would be possible. We certainly have to see whether Ubuntu is going to do some efforts to go in the same direction, but I certainly hope that they will. We'll keep our user base That's what I doubt. Ubuntu LTS will be better than Debian stable in all aspects, why should anybody continue using Debian stable? Why are you using Debian and not Ubuntu? For me: - Debian is where we shape the future - Debian's goals/principles are in sync with my own values - Debian can be used on embedded targets - Debian is stable and more tested (even if we freeze at the same time, we're likely to release after Ubuntu with way more fixes than Ubuntu) This is not going to change and as long as that's true, Debian won't die as we will keep an active development community. I'm also quite convinced that by doing better communication/marketing that explains what we are, we can continue to attract new users and new developers. World domination does not start with competing with Ubuntu but with competing with all the proprietary systems out there and for this we would certain benefit from more cooperation with Ubuntu. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thursday 30 July 2009, Thomas Viehmann wrote: After the talk Bdale commented about the length of the freeze and the made observation (actually had a complaint) that the length of the freeze is something were not the release team, but the project at large should ask itself what to do better. That has not happened. And that why you have so many RC bugs, including so many trivially fixable ones. This is actually my main worry regarding the very early freeze date. For both Etch and Lenny, although the actual full freeze was somewhere around December, the start of the whole freeze and release process was *way* earlier: around July! That means: we're already too late. IMO freezing in December without adequate preparation will only mean that we'll end up being frozen for most of 2010 and release somewhere at the end of 2010, not in April. I expect that a lot of developers will simply continue with their current plans based on the original 18-24 months release schedule, especially given the totally botched way this new plan was introduced. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:19:58AM +0200, Thomas Viehmann wrote:
The problem of lenny's long freeze was in part that there was so few
people working on the release and on fixing RC bugs. And that
deficit also shows in the quality of lenny. If people feel that
flamewars are needed to keep Debian relevant, how about flaming the
people sitting on their unfixed RC bugs instead of always focusing
on the release team?
snip
You know what another great way is to make Debian irrelevant? Make
sure that releases are impossible because nobody wants to be the
release manager.
Applause.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:51, Raphael Hertzoghert...@debian.org wrote: On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Marc Haber wrote: That's what I doubt. Ubuntu LTS will be better than Debian stable in all aspects, why should anybody continue using Debian stable? Why are you using Debian and not Ubuntu? For me: - Debian is where we shape the future - Debian's goals/principles are in sync with my own values - Debian can be used on embedded targets - Debian is stable and more tested (even if we freeze at the same time, we're likely to release after Ubuntu with way more fixes than Ubuntu) This is not going to change and as long as that's true, Debian won't die as we will keep an active development community. This is what I call the great and irreplaceable Debian culture, or what Martin Krafft calls The Debian System. Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but it's with good reason. World domination does not start with competing with Ubuntu but with competing with all the proprietary systems out there and for this we would certain benefit from more cooperation with Ubuntu. Excellent points you put up here. Wow! -- my place on the web: floss-and-misc.blogspot.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Marc Haber mh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: Hi, I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. For the record: I concur fully with Marc's statement above. Changing our release policy to match Ubuntu's LTS, changing our well-established, well-recognized logo for a simplified crap that has nothing special to it... What next? If some of our core teams members feel like they'd rather work on Ubuntu, then, by all means, please go ahead and arrange that with Shuttleworth. You'll be better for everybody. Turning Debian into Ubuntu's bitch, however, is not a viable way forward for anybody involved. JB. -- Julien BLACHE - Debian GNU/Linux Developer - jbla...@debian.org Public key available on http://www.jblache.org - KeyID: F5D6 5169 GPG Fingerprint : 935A 79F1 C8B3 3521 FD62 7CC7 CD61 4FD7 F5D6 5169 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:27, Julien BLACHEjbla...@debian.org wrote: Marc Haber mh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: Hi, I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. For the record: I concur fully with Marc's statement above. Changing our release policy to match Ubuntu's LTS, changing our well-established, well-recognized logo for a simplified crap that has nothing special to it... What next? So much anger! The logo thing is mere proposal. If some of our core teams members feel like they'd rather work on Ubuntu, then, by all means, please go ahead and arrange that with Shuttleworth. You'll be better for everybody. Turning Debian into Ubuntu's bitch, however, is not a viable way forward for anybody involved. Don't you think you should have kept quite instead of cursing like this? Did you read Steve Langasek's and Raphael Hertzog's points for one? Did Ubuntu eat your kittens? -- my place on the web: floss-and-misc.blogspot.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
So what? [Was: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes]
After one day and more of flaming about the subject, may I summarize - with my John Doe Debian Developer hat on - what it seems a few points catched and ask RMs about their thoughts on them? I woud prefer the project did a little step forward instead of flaming and complaining only. - A freeze every two years could be viable/appropriate to many, or at least it seems so. This is basically not so different from the current 'unofficial' policy. - A freeze in December for squeeze is probably too early for many teams. Maybe next spring/summer is more appropriate and acceptable? - A so long support and roadmap for squeeze and squeeze+1 is probably not justifiable/difficult to support/what else... - Next time, any team that would take a decision which impacts the whole project have to be fair and consult the project as a whole, before unilateral actions. That's appropriate even if the team is acting within its own limits of decision making, as in this case. This appears as responsible and appropriate to the most. This is a general recommendation and does not require comments, probably. Folks, be pragmatic and do required steps to find a common shared idea. -- Francesco P. Lovergine -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hello, On ketvirtadienis 30 Liepa 2009 11:37:46 Raphael Hertzog wrote: I don't mind who changes the date for the other but I really don't agree that doing it is only for Ubuntu's advantage. Nobody in Debian would have taken such a decision, we are Debian developers and have no interest in helping only Ubuntu. What we're speaking of is synergy between both distributions. You know the it's the principle behind “the combination of both is worth more that the sum of individual parts”. Debian might not bleed too much in terms of existing users, but it might not attract more new ones. You fail to sees that Ubuntu has a huge marketing machine behind it which will overshadow Debian. And why wouldn't they? They make (most?) money from LTS which is in fact aimed at corporate workstations and servers - the majority user base of Debian stable users. Since Ubuntu will do their best on this front so it might make sense to avoid this disadvantage (since we objectively can't do better in marketing). What is more, we are indeed forgetting that Ubuntu releases each 6 months. Whenever Debian freezes, it already benefits some Ubuntu release(s) (and vice versa). So this is just a proof that this freeze date is aimed specially at Ubuntu LTS. Actually, I don't see much wrong with that (despite concerns I expressed above) and this could very well be a future goal (for Dec 2011). But no, Debian has (for some unknown reason) to do this now (Dec 2009) and in my humble opinion mess up developers' plans (which might result in demotivating them), end up in long freeze due to huge number of RC bugs, planned but not done/rushed transitions (demotivated people, less work done) and finally release in the end of 2010 with old software. In addition, now Debian puts more burden on security team and everyone requiring to support both lenny and squeeze of their packages which would have been plain unnecessary if the next release date would not be rushed and so badly communicated (which for some reason is not admitted either). So let's just freeze late in the early/middle spring of 2010 this time and aim for Dec 2011 freeze next time. If you disagree with that, please enlighten me why Debian needs to rush _this time_. If synchronization is so badly wanted for the next Debian release, why not to synchronize with Ubuntu 10.10 (as an experiment)? By the way, why isn't it obvious that Debian developers _want_ to be informed about important decisions in advance, not from the press *after* the fact or any other source outside the project? We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. The synchronization with Ubuntu is not going to remove our identity. We'll keep our user base and the possible improvements in both distributions will help us do better in the competition with other operating systems (proprietary or not). Synchronization will not remove Debian identity. However, what's badly needed here is *official* position about Debian vs. Ubuntu relationship. Currently, there is absolutely no clarity about that (some hints are coming only from Ubuntu side which is frustrating). It is obvious to anybody that Dec 2009 was chosen to accommodate Ubuntu LTS release cycle, yet any official announcement failed to mention that (is Debian afraid of it?). On the other hand, Mark Shuttleworth said this openly (which means, he thinks it is good for Ubuntu). Let's just make this relationship clear one day. Everybody would benefit from that even if they do not like it. -- Modestas Vainius modes...@vainius.eu signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: So what? [Was: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes]
Hello, On ketvirtadienis 30 Liepa 2009 13:49:42 Francesco P. Lovergine wrote: After one day and more of flaming about the subject, may I summarize - with my John Doe Debian Developer hat on - what it seems a few points catched and ask RMs about their thoughts on them? I woud prefer the project did a little step forward instead of flaming and complaining only. - A freeze every two years could be viable/appropriate to many, or at least it seems so. This is basically not so different from the current 'unofficial' policy. - A freeze in December for squeeze is probably too early for many teams. Maybe next spring/summer is more appropriate and acceptable? - A so long support and roadmap for squeeze and squeeze+1 is probably not justifiable/difficult to support/what else... - Next time, any team that would take a decision which impacts the whole project have to be fair and consult the project as a whole, before unilateral actions. That's appropriate even if the team is acting within its own limits of decision making, as in this case. This appears as responsible and appropriate to the most. This is a general recommendation and does not require comments, probably. Folks, be pragmatic and do required steps to find a common shared idea. +1 to all points. Very well summarized my POV. -- Modestas Vainius modes...@vainius.eu signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-30 11:36 +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Oh, and Debian got hundreds of active developers, and I doubt they'll be running to Shuttleworth anytime soon. Probably not, but the release synchronization with Ubuntu may make them feel that they are working for him, which can be a great demotivation. That's part of the irreplaceable culture that will ensure Debian's continued existence. The culture may be irreplaceable, but irreplaceability does not ensure continued existence. Sven -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 01:09:35PM +, Anthony Towns wrote: For three, what happened to getting the firmware issue resolved early in squeeze's cycle [1]? It's evidently no longer early in squeeze's cycle, so maybe I just somehow missed the decision on that... [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2009/05/msg0.html For those who didn't see this post [womble] on Planet Debian already: [womble]http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/status-of-firmware-in-debian Status of firmware in Debian A question from AJ reminded me that I haven't said much about the changes to packaging of firmware in Debian, and in particular the separation of non-free firmware from the Linux kernel. Linux kernel packages There is an ongoing process upstream to move firmware blobs from drivers into a firmware/ subdirectory of the source, which is now almost complete. Since most of this firmware is non-free, we remove it from the source tarballs for kernel packages but use it to update the firmware-nonfree source package. We continue to patch some drivers to separate out firmware, and have been submitting our changes upstream. Most of these have been accepted though the DRI drivers matrox, r128 and radeon are notable exceptions. A few months ago I attempted to make a new inventory of the remaining firmware blobs [inventory] outside of the firmware/ subdirectory. I identified three that should still be addressed. The Linux-libre [libre] project, however, removes many other constant arrays from the kernel [arrays] (and disables the affected drivers) where I judged the array to be a plausible preferred form of modification. Firmware packages Much of the non-free firmware removed from the kernel is now available in the firmware-linux package in the non-free section of the Debian archive. Starting with Linux 2.6.31, we will build the DFSG-free firmware shipped with Linux into a package called firmware-linux-free, which will be recommended by kernel image packages. The contents of firmware-linux will be moved to firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-linux becomes a meta-package depending on the other two packages. Many other firmware images [others] never distributed with Linux are also packaged for the benefit of users that require them. [inventory] http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing#Inventory [libre] http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ [arrays]http://www.fsfla.org/svn/fsfla/software/linux-libre/scripts/ [others]http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/firmware-nonfree Does that mean we can now pass something along the lines of [reaffirm] for squeeze and expect minimal (or no) effect on the release? If so, that seems like a major cause for celebration, no? [reaffirm] http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003#texta Cheers, aj -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-30 13:12 (+0200), Sven Joachim wrote: On 2009-07-30 11:36 +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Oh, and Debian got hundreds of active developers, and I doubt they'll be running to Shuttleworth anytime soon. Probably not, but the release synchronization with Ubuntu may make them feel that they are working for him, which can be a great demotivation. That's why it would be interesting to hear some concrete ideas how useful this would be for the parties. How pros and cons balance? I'll start: Ubuntu == + Ubuntu always gets a frozen and pretty stable system even if they don't communicate at all with Debian. (This is just a mind exercise, I'm sure there is some collaboration.) + Better-quality LTS releases. Happier users and customers. + More collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers and teams. Debian == + More collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers and teams. - Debian developers may feel that it's Ubuntu which they are working for in the end. Possibly with the feeling that some of the decision-making escapes the Debian developer community. Can be demotivating. - OK, Ubuntu x.04 was released in April but because of their lower quality standards and the 6-month release cycle they most likely won't be helping Debian to fix the rest of the difficult RC bugs. They are already working on their next 6-month period. Ubuntu gets a lot of publicity because of the release but Debian always comes too late, literally always after Ubuntu. (It's worth the wait for many people but the possible negative publicity can be demotivating for Debian community.) A couple of months later eventually the RC bugs are fixed in Debian and there is a release. Ubuntu will apply some of the bug fixes to their LTS x.y.1 releases (3-month point release cycle). This can make some Debian developers feel that Ubuntu gets something for free again without contributing back. Can be demotivating. + Debian's quality probably won't decrease (except for Squeeze maybe). + [Please invent more concrete benefits for Debian developers and users.] Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic. After all what do I know? I'm not a Debian developer, just a user. Thanks you, all developers! :-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Teemu Likonen wrote: On 2009-07-30 13:12 (+0200), Sven Joachim wrote: Probably not, but the release synchronization with Ubuntu may make them feel that they are working for him, which can be a great demotivation. That's why it would be interesting to hear some concrete ideas how useful this would be for the parties. How pros and cons balance? I'll start: Ubuntu == + Ubuntu always gets a frozen and pretty stable system even if they don't communicate at all with Debian. (This is just a mind exercise, I'm sure there is some collaboration.) + Better-quality LTS releases. Happier users and customers. + More collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers and teams. Debian == + More collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers and teams. - Debian developers may feel that it's Ubuntu which they are working for in the end. Possibly with the feeling that some of the decision-making escapes the Debian developer community. Can be demotivating. - OK, Ubuntu x.04 was released in April but because of their lower quality standards and the 6-month release cycle they most likely won't be helping Debian to fix the rest of the difficult RC bugs. They are already working on their next 6-month period. Ubuntu gets a lot of publicity because of the release but Debian always comes too late, literally always after Ubuntu. (It's worth the wait for many people but the possible negative publicity can be demotivating for Debian community.) A couple of months later eventually the RC bugs are fixed in Debian and there is a release. Ubuntu will apply some of the bug fixes to their LTS x.y.1 releases (3-month point release cycle). This can make some Debian developers feel that Ubuntu gets something for free again without contributing back. Can be demotivating. + Debian's quality probably won't decrease (except for Squeeze maybe). + [Please invent more concrete benefits for Debian developers and users.] + Security fixes prepared for Ubuntu will be (sometimes ?) applicable directly to Debian, which would be a reduction in workload for the Debian Security team. (Or phrased differently: Debian and Ubuntu security teams will be able to prepare security fixes together, for the same frozen versions.) - At the release date, the gap between released software and upstream development versions is bigger in Debian stable than it was in Ubuntu LTS when it released. This gap is maybe not important for stability and for the quality of Debian stable, but it can be in the users' eyes. Remember that most non-corporate Ubuntu users will use the latest released version of Ubuntu. By such, they are getting stabilised versions 3-4 times during one Debian stable release cycle. Having Debian stable outdated (with regards to upstream released versions) is normal and intended. But having the releases synchronised will IMHO make Debian and Ubuntu LTS very similar. I initially thought that this would favor Ubuntu, but it might not be necessarily true in the end. Thanks you, all developers! :-) Thank you for summarizing my thoughts in a somewhat more constructive and calm way than I did. Regards, OdyX -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: + Security fixes prepared for Ubuntu will be (sometimes ?) applicable directly to Debian, which would be a reduction in workload for the Debian Security team. (Or phrased differently: Debian and Ubuntu security teams will be able to prepare security fixes together, for the same frozen versions.) I doubt the Release Team will accept a new GNOME, KDE, X, and Kernel after the freeze in December, in which case Debian and Ubuntu LTS won't have the same major components, since e.g. in the case of GNOME, we would ship the GNOME released in September, and Ubuntu would ship the one released in March. So unless we freezed way later, this wouldn't be true AFAICS. Cheers, Emilio signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thursday 30 July 2009, Teemu Likonen wrote: Debian == - The completely voluntary nature of the project does not really lend itself to hard timelines. If it turns out on the planned date of the freeze that there are still major issues open, we need to be flexible enough to delay the freeze. Both the Etch and Lenny releases did clearly show this, and the success of both releases (Etch more than Lenny IMO) is largely thanks to flexible starts of the incremental freeze stages. Given Debian's release history it is IMO wishful thinking to expect to be able to freeze on a set date. There is simply no way you can direct anybody to work on specific issues *now* because the freeze is coming. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-30, Marc Haber mh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: I don't see the advantage for Debian short of probable ease of work for the security team (which doesn't seem to have commented yet). The synergy is negligable, since the most time-consuming elements (testing, handling the buildds and the release) need to be done individually anyway. Also, Ubuntu supports only a subset of Debian with security updates. Cheers, Moritz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:49:48AM +0200, Steve Langasek wrote: Doesn't this imply that everyone who continues using Debian today does so merely as an accident of the release schedule and the particular set of packages that land in a given Debian release? That and the fact that upgrades between Debian stable releases are easier (or, at least, more officially supported) than from Debian to Ubuntu. At the moment I could recommend Debian stable over Ubuntu LTS because it has more recent packages (2009/02 release versus 2008/04 release), or because it's an easier upgrade for people with existing Debian systems. With synchronised releases, both those reasons to run stable disappear. OTOH, perhaps you're saying that you think that the proposed sychronization will be successful, and as a result Ubuntu's quality will come up, eliminating a key differentiator between the two at present? 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 dateguaranteed release date support for all pkgs support for main, best-effort for universe stabilise from testingupgrade support from previous Ubuntu 6mo release upgrade from oldstableupgrade support from previous Ubuntu LTS (?) support for 6-12 archssupport for 2-3 architectures availability of pre-installed systems full-time security support staff commercial quality support larger userbase some additional packages Having stable and LTS have mostly the same packages makes apples-to-apples quality comparisons easier, which might be good or bad for Debian depending on what the difference is. It'll make cross-grades from Debian to Ubuntu fairly easy, removing most of the lock-in on Debian's behalf; and probably vice-versa. 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. So afaics, Ubuntu LTS looks to be the better system to use in all but niche cases (non-x86/amd64 machines). 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. Testable/refutable claim: my impression is most changes developed for an Ubuntu release don't make it into Debian testing/stable until after that release is out. I'm not particularly bothered by this in and of itself -- if Ubuntu LTS becomes better in every way than Debian stable is now, well great: let's all use that instead! Benefits of free software, etc! But if stable doesn't get used much because LTS releases (or short-term-support Ubuntu releases) are way better, I expect that will have a flow-on effect making testing and unstable less useful/effective, which in turn will make Ubuntu less useful/effective. That doesn't sound like a fun outcome for anyone to me. Cheers, aj -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Modestas Vainius wrote: So let's just freeze late in the early/middle spring of 2010 this time and aim for Dec 2011 freeze next time. If you disagree with that, please enlighten me why Debian needs to rush _this time_. If synchronization is so badly wanted for the next Debian release, why not to synchronize with Ubuntu 10.10 (as an experiment)? Luk explained in the RM keynote that they do not want the freeze to conflict with debconf so that developers are free to work on new stuff aimed at unstable in this (usually productive) week. That said, I do not think that this concern alone is enough for us to rush a squeeze release and I agree that it would also be reasonable to just target a freeze somewhere in the middle of next year and leave an opportunity to cooperate with Ubuntu for their 10.10 release. It would mean that their next LTS release that would be in sync with Debian 7.0 will be 12.04 which is less than their 2/2.5 years release cycle for LTS. They can probably cope with that though. By the way, why isn't it obvious that Debian developers _want_ to be informed about important decisions in advance, not from the press *after* the fact or any other source outside the project? It really depends on the decision, for example the decision to join opensource for america was taken without prior discussion and it's ok for me. But something that has such a direct impact on the work of DD ought to be discussed a bit and at least announced to DD at the same time that it's announced to the users/press... but with content that is adjusted for them so that we do not have to read between the lines (I knew the context because I was at the keynote where this has been presented but not everybody was there). Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Frans Pop wrote: Both the Etch and Lenny releases did clearly show this, and the success of both releases (Etch more than Lenny IMO) is largely thanks to flexible starts of the incremental freeze stages. The staged freeze has been a major pain for anyone working on the packages affected by the first stage of the freeze. For dpkg/dpkg-dev we could not go forward for almost 8 months. There's no reason why we can't freeze all at the same time (or really have very short delays between each stage of the freeze). The fixed date makes it much more easy for everybody to remember when the freeze starts and plan accordingly. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thursday 30 July 2009, Raphael Hertzog wrote: On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Frans Pop wrote: Both the Etch and Lenny releases did clearly show this, and the success of both releases (Etch more than Lenny IMO) is largely thanks to flexible starts of the incremental freeze stages. The staged freeze has been a major pain for anyone working on the packages affected by the first stage of the freeze. For dpkg/dpkg-dev we could not go forward for almost 8 months. I agree that the first freeze stage was started too early (when the list of open issues was clearly still to long) and that the delay between the stages could and should be shorter. There's no reason why we can't freeze all at the same time (or really have very short delays between each stage of the freeze). The fixed date makes it much more easy for everybody to remember when the freeze starts and plan accordingly. Well, we've had fairly clear announcements for when the freeze was supposed to start for the past three releases. And we did not make them. I personally don't think a fixed freeze date is really going to change that. I could be wrong though. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 03:24:03PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Modestas Vainius wrote: So let's just freeze late in the early/middle spring of 2010 this time and aim for Dec 2011 freeze next time. If you disagree with that, please enlighten me why Debian needs to rush _this time_. If synchronization is so badly wanted for the next Debian release, why not to synchronize with Ubuntu 10.10 (as an experiment)? Luk explained in the RM keynote that they do not want the freeze to conflict with debconf so that developers are free to work on new stuff aimed at unstable in this (usually productive) week. That's probably a good point to avoid that. But given that Squeeze is going to be an exception by the short release cycle anyway, why can't we add another exception that the first freeze is not December, even if it means the other implied exception is that we are in freeze for Debconf *10* (and not for every Debconf)? -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73 aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 01:07:39PM +, Anthony Towns wrote: Debian stable Ubuntu LTS 2 year rel cycle 2 year rel cycle 3 years security 3 years desktop security, 5 years server guaranteed freeze dateguaranteed release date support for all pkgs support for main, best-effort for universe stabilise from testingupgrade support from previous Ubuntu 6mo release upgrade from oldstableupgrade support from previous Ubuntu LTS (?) support for 6-12 archssupport for 2-3 architectures availability of pre-installed systems full-time security support staff commercial quality support larger userbase some additional packages Debian stable has commercial quality support as well, but it is significantly harder to find companies offering such and it requires corporate entities to actuall think (*gah*) and take a choice, both of which is mostly undesired in current commerceland. Plus for Ubuntu, since one can simply go to canonical without having to decide. Greetins Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hi *, On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:46 AM, Marc Habermh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 08:45:41AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote: Why not freeze in June 2010 instead of December 2009 and then freeze again in December 2011*? Mark Shuttleworth seems (at least seemed) to be fine with delaying Ubuntu LTS by half a year to get Ubuntu and Debian in sync [1]: | The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on the conversation that | is going on right now between Debian and Ubuntu. I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try hard to make it look like that. In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. I do agree with what you have written. I think if Debian has worked more than 13 years as it is right now, changing our way of working to satisfy what other says is not good, it's something that won't help us to improve anything. I wouldn't like to be bad understood because of what I have written. I am not blaming the release team nor saying that that was the fact which make them to take such a decision, but I can't see what the reasons were. I only read a message saying Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes. IMO, this time-based release will have a very important impact in how Debian is seen either by our users and the community since there not appear to have any consensus of the benefits of this decision for us. I am not sure if it'll be a bad or a good decision (because we haven't implemented it yet) , but given the way everyone is getting this, it will have a bad impact. On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Frans Popelen...@planet.nl wrote: On Thursday 30 July 2009, Teemu Likonen wrote: Debian == - The completely voluntary nature of the project does not really lend itself to hard timelines. If it turns out on the planned date of the freeze that there are still major issues open, we need to be flexible enough to delay the freeze. This is the main reason why this announce is being that controversial. Debian is a voluntary-nature project, imposing this kind of time-lines, or even worse, forcing in some way to change the plans of DD's to carry out their changes to packages | goals for a release, it will cause this conflicts. We have had this kind of discussions before, and we always have been able to decide correctly. I hope this time we do it, too. Regards, -- Muammar El Khatib. Linux user: 403107. GPG Key = 127029F1 http://muammar.me | http://proyectociencia.org ,''`. : :' : `. `' `- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34:05 -0430, Muammar El Khatib wrote: I think if Debian has worked more than 13 years as it is right now It has not. Cheers, Julien -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hi, On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 01:07:39PM +, 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 dateguaranteed release date support for all pkgs support for main, best-effort for universe stabilise from testingupgrade support from previous Ubuntu 6mo release upgrade from oldstableupgrade support from previous Ubuntu LTS (?) support for 6-12 archssupport 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
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
Hi, Teemu Likonen schrieb: Debian == [...] + [Please invent more concrete benefits for Debian developers and users.] + Settling on the same upstream versions will help maintaining them over the long period of time, so freeing valuable developer time from debian members. Jan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 05:10:29PM +0200, Julien Cristau wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34:05 -0430, Muammar El Khatib wrote: I think if Debian has worked more than 13 years as it is right now It has not. How do you call what we have done since then if not working? I mean, we have our troubles and we are not always as fast as we would like ourselves to be, but we have always shelled out useable and stable releases. What more do you want, blood? Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things.Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30 2009, Raphael Hertzog wrote: On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Marc Haber wrote: In fact, I would prefer if Ubuntu had to change _their_ scheduled to accomodate us, if they want to have the advantage of being in sync with us. It's _their_ advantage after all, not ours. I don't mind who changes the date for the other but I really don't agree that doing it is only for Ubuntu's advantage. Nobody in Debian would have taken such a decision, we are Debian developers and have no interest in helping only Ubuntu. I wish I could actually whole heartedly concur, but actual actions do not seem to mesh with the nice sentiment. What we're speaking of is synergy between both distributions. You know the it's the principle behind “the combination of both is worth more that the sum of individual parts”. Another nice sentiment. But the whole is not always more than the sum of the parts; and in this particular case, the synergy between the distributions is far skewed one way. I spend a log of time with my upstreams, and I am trying to implement the philosophy that any change in my packages be trated as a bug (whether or not it is in the bts), and sent upstream. I use upstream bug trackers, and upstream mailing lists, accommodating the author. Very rarely do I see such feedback coming from Ubuntu (the SELinux maintainers are the the pleasant exception). If Ubuntu were better at feeding back patches into the debian bts, well, what you say might have been true. We are not only major supplier to Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed that way. The synchronization with Ubuntu is not going to remove our identity. Anything to back up this assertion? We'll keep our user base and the possible improvements in both Why would the casual user select something that has old KDE/GNOME, has the same or more bug fixes (since bug fixes rarely migrate from ubuntu to debian, based on my experience), and does not have commercial support? While I personally care little about popularity, I do think this assertion that we will not lose our users is unfounded optimism. manoj -- Even if you persuade me, you won't persuade me. Aristophanes Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On, 07/30/2009 10:50 AM, Marc Haber wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 05:10:29PM +0200, Julien Cristau wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34:05 -0430, Muammar El Khatib wrote: I think if Debian has worked more than 13 years as it is right now It has not. How do you call what we have done since then if not working? I mean, we have our troubles and we are not always as fast as we would like ourselves to be, but we have always shelled out useable and stable releases. What more do you want, blood? That's what I meant. I know we are not perfect, but we have survived to the pass of the time and I am sure that this is because of the decisions we have taken and that we do a good work. But it is really interesting to see the diversity of opinions. Regards, -- Muammar El Khatib. Linux user: 403107. Key fingerprint = 90B8 BFC4 4A75 B881 39A3 1440 30EB 403B 1270 29F1 http://muammar.me | http://proyectociencia.org ,''`. : :' : `. `' `- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30 2009, Steve Langasek wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:07:58AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote: We'll keep our user base That's what I doubt. Ubuntu LTS will be better than Debian stable in all aspects, why should anybody continue using Debian stable? You believe that Debian, releasing with approximately the same set of packages as an Ubuntu LTS but with a requirement to only release when ready instead of releasing on a fixed schedule as Ubuntu LTS will, offers no relevant differentiation at all for users? If ubuntu freeze starts later than the Debian freeze, and if fixes to Ubuntu do not often migrate back to Debian, I do see it likely that ubuntu LTS, combined with interim Ubuntu release, will make Debian irrelevant in the eyes of the common public (like, not distro geeks). With that comes a falling user base, and with falling interest we stop getting the creme de la creme of the developers (Oh, doubtless we'll keep getting people of second and third tier skills for a while). Doesn't this imply that everyone who continues using Debian today does so merely as an accident of the release schedule and the particular set of packages that land in a given Debian release? I am sure this is true of some portion of the user base. 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? Exactly. As I mentioned in another message; I spend far more time rebasing changes made in debian to feed upstream, using their BTS and mailing lists, and modifying and tweaking patches to their satisfaction; and I rarely see this in the 25+ packages I still maintain from Ubuntu (exception: SElinux related issues). While never committing to keep any given package in sync with Debian, Ubuntu developers certainly are actively engaged in pushing their changes upstream to Debian. So they seem to be targetting my packages not to push changes to? kinda doubt that. manoj -- A sinking ship gathers no moss. Donald Kaul Manoj Srivastava sriva...@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 17:20:28 +0200, Marc Haber wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 05:10:29PM +0200, Julien Cristau wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34:05 -0430, Muammar El Khatib wrote: I think if Debian has worked more than 13 years as it is right now It has not. How do you call what we have done since then if not working? I mean, we have our troubles and we are not always as fast as we would like ourselves to be, but we have always shelled out useable and stable releases. What more do you want, blood? No. I'm just saying that Debian hasn't worked for 13 years as it is right now. I'm pretty sure things have changed over the years, including in the release process, so opposing a change because the current way of doing things has worked for 13 years is bogus. Cheers, Julien -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Mi, 29 Jul 2009, Luk Claes wrote: The developers have had the opportunity and still have the opportunity to get stuff done before the release. It's true that developers should probably consider to already be careful about what to upload, but there is still opportunity to do changes till the freeze. Ok, for the Debian TeX Team that means that squeeze will contain TeX Live 2007, and will be like that till squeeze+1 in 2012. That is quite ridiculuos, but I cannot finish TL2009 packages alone and by December. So it be. That also means I can stop working on it at all now, and wait for TeX Live 2010 to come out and package that one. Best wishes Norbert --- Dr. Norbert Preining prein...@logic.atVienna University of Technology Debian Developer prein...@debian.org Debian TeX Group gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094 --- What the hell, he thought, you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side. --- Ford outwitting a Vogon with a rocket launcher by going --- into another certain death situation. --- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:17:46AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: I spend a log of time with my upstreams, and I am trying to implement the philosophy that any change in my packages be trated as a bug (whether or not it is in the bts), and sent upstream. I use upstream bug trackers, and upstream mailing lists, accommodating the author. Very rarely do I see such feedback coming from Ubuntu (the SELinux maintainers are the the pleasant exception). If Ubuntu were better at feeding back patches into the debian bts, well, what you say might have been true. Why do you assume that there are other modifications to your packages to *be* fed back? Here are the set of packages you maintain or are an uploader on that Ubuntu has modified versions of in karmic: Package: flex Version: 2.5.35-7ubuntu1 Package: libselinux Version: 2.0.82-1ubuntu2 Package: policycoreutils Version: 2.0.55-1ubuntu1 Package: setools Version: 3.3.5.ds-5ubuntu2 Three of these are SELinux packages, the fourth is flex; its changelog entry is: flex (2.5.35-7ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low * Merge from debian unstable, remaining changes: - Don't run the testsuite on hppa (threaded tests hang). -- Muharem Hrnjadovic muha...@canonical.com Wed, 06 May 2009 18:10:12 +0200 You're welcome to this change if you want it - I'll pull a patch out myself and submit it to the BTS if you think it's relevant in Debian, but I don't see that flex has FTBFS in Debian - but in any case the Ubuntu hppa port has been EOLed for karmic, so Ubuntu would otherwise (ideally) drop this patch the next time there's a flex update to merge from Debian. You seem to have been operating under a misconception that the *majority* of packages in Ubuntu have been touched wrt Debian. They have not - the vast majority of packages in Ubuntu are unmodified Debian packages, as shown by the graphs on the bottom of https://merges.ubuntu.com/main.html and https://merges.ubuntu.com/universe.html - which is for the best given the relative number of developers working on each project. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 07:05:13PM +0200, Norbert Preining wrote: On Mi, 29 Jul 2009, Luk Claes wrote: The developers have had the opportunity and still have the opportunity to get stuff done before the release. It's true that developers should probably consider to already be careful about what to upload, but there is still opportunity to do changes till the freeze. Ok, for the Debian TeX Team that means that squeeze will contain TeX Live 2007, and will be like that till squeeze+1 in 2012. That is quite ridiculuos, but I cannot finish TL2009 packages alone and by December. So it be. Luckily it doesn't have to be. As just announced by Luk on d-d-a this freeze date is going to be revised and TL2009 still has chances. Even better that our Release Managers (who of course read this) now are aware of your concerns. That also means I can stop working on it at all now, and wait for TeX Live 2010 to come out and package that one. Please don't, please! :) Hauke signature.asc Description: Digital signature
