Assesment

Not only 'other distributions' should work more closely with upstream, Ubuntu (and Debian, by the way) should do that to. And I think that's implicit in this 'cadence' plan. When you go out of your way to have upstream select a 'best version' for downstream, then you're not going to apply a whole bunch of patches. Any downstream patch will undermine the idea of what Shuttleworth and the Debian folks are trying to accomplish here.