Shuttleworth: N-imal?

Still, they are all in alphabetical order.

So it's still easy to figure which one is older/newer.

google is not selling an OSS desktop system, they are selling a phone that happens to do some tricks.

some of the apps packaged are worthwhile, but many of them boil down to taking a web application and redefining it as an app.

but you also can't claim that the linux approach of a package manager and a repository doesn't work and point at the android (or iphone) app store and say itdoes work, all the app store is is a repository for their package manager to work from.

now if android starts being used on tablets and netbook machines like people are predicting, I expect that there will be a shakeup among the apps, but I also expect that ubuntu and other desktop orientated linux distros will add one more package to their repository "Android App Store Client' that will allow the users to download and install the android apps (debian may not add it as it will not be free enough for them, but everyone else will)

You want numbers? I'm more than happy to give you very detailed numbers on the number of fedora contributors with commit access for packaging work. I can even give you a break down of Red Hat versus external. Last time I looked it was more externals with commit access (with the caveat that its a hueristic based on information in the account system and there is no requirement that all Red Hat employees identify themselves as such in the system). I'd need a couple of days to dust off the scripts to pull that information from the Fedora Account System again.

Can someone volunteer to do that for Ubuntu packaging commit access with a breakdown of Canonical to external involvement?

There's a very significant difference in how packaging is done in Ubuntu versus Fedora or even Debian. Both Fedora and Debian put more stress on having a primary maintainer on each and every package...a person who is ultimately accountable for the welfare of a particular package. And while different in detail, both policies help self-regulate the number of packages as a function of the number of maintainers in order to keep a sustainable amount of workload across the repository structure. Ubuntu's loose team approach is significantly different and they have many more packages per committer and their contributor manpower is not growing apace. They can get by with this approach primarily beccause Debian has the tighter accountability model and they reuse much of the packaging work Debian in their merge process. There's no way Ubuntu's packaging process could scale if Ubuntu was a distinct distribution that was not leveraging Debian packages as a significant resource. The manpower situation is only going to get more complicated for Ubuntu if their plans for software center move forward and they allow application developers to short circuit their standing packaging submission and review process.

-jef