Swimming against the tide.

> Surely if "it's $X that does most of the work", but "$Y didn't give a crap about
compatibility" then it would make it very hard (impossible?) for $Y to do all that leeching
from $X...


No it's not. 

What you do is this:

Start off with a Operating System that is essentially a snapshot of Debian Unstable. 

Then go and modify and break a bunch of existing functionality in order to add your own.  Say
edit some INIT scripts so that they work well with a newer version of Network-Manager (or some
other new sort of thing) without caring of your changes break a bunch of other scripts that
depended on what your editing. 

Then update a bunch of packages, remove a bunch of packages you don't like, and change things
around so that the versioning numbers are different and files sorted with package X on your
custom distro are conflicting with package Y provided by Debian.. which you don't plan on ever
using so it's not a big deal.

And then on top of that while your doing all of this Debian has started introducing newer
versions of packages that you've modified.

----------------

Look at it this way:

It's a hell of a lot easier and you get your work done much faster if you don't care about
compatibility.

Package compatibility takes a lot of extra effort and testing. It's a hell of a lot easier to
break something and have it work for your specific task then it is to modify it while making
sure that it still works.

----------------


If you don't believe me, find out yourself. 

Take all the Gnome packages built for Ubuntu and then install them on Debian Lenny. Get back
to me on how well that works out for you, although I really doubt anybody has to try that out
to guess how well that would work out.

I believe that Ubuntu re-bases itself off of Debian for each release. So this isn't a serious
problem were distributions have diverged off into 2 entirely different directions. I
understand that a lot of work that Ubuntu does goes back into Debian. It just takes extra
effort.


---------------------------

> "[I]t's about time that the Ubuntu vs Debian thing goes by the wayside"; one would hope so.
There are quite a few Debian developers out there, of which 2% happen to be on the payroll of
a certain Ubuntu backer. It must be so annoying to spend 40 hours per week swimming one way
and the other 40 hours per week swimming in the opposite direction.


What ends up happening is that you end up just doing everything twice. Once for Ubuntu and
again for Debian.

What I am trying to point out here is how nice it would be that people would only have to make
a package one time and have it work in both distros.