Ubuntu as a technological playground for Debian [LWN.net]

Ubuntu as a technological playground for Debian

Posted Nov 26, 2010 10:47 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Can you give some concrete examples? As a long-time DD who has recently been exposed to Ubuntu and UDS, I have found the differences in how things are done interesting. In many ways it seems much easier to get something tried/done in Ubuntu because you only have to persuade the roomful of people at a UDS session then you can pretty-much go ahead. Getting major changes done in Debian is a much slower and less well-defined process. This is of course a double-edge benefit :-)

I'd be interesting to hear of experiments in Ubuntu that went well and ones that went badly.

Ubuntu as a technological playground for Debian

Posted Nov 26, 2010 19:21 UTC (Fri) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

Ubuntus early chromium-browser package and PPA (by Fabien Tassin et al) worked out well for all, I think. The package couldnt be added to Debian so early for copyright reasons, and this early packaging provided an inspiration for the Debian packaging when it came.

Per-package archives with newer upstream versions of Debian packages are very useful. They dont exist within Debian because the infrastructure for that doesnt exist. Example: git.

I suspect (please dont flame me) that having python2.6 in Ubuntu early was a net positive for Debian and Ubuntu. Uploading to Debian experimental at the same time would have been better, since it would allow use of Debian's bug tracking system, give Debian developers a chance to help out with packaging details, and make it easier for many packages to be tested against the new version of Python.

Packages in "universe" are another story. Some Ubuntu contributors introducing packages there do not seem to have made any effort to contact the corresponding Debian maintainer. Yes, breakage sometimes results.

Some experiments do not seem to have been mentioned to the corresponding Debian package maintainers at all. Example: use of profile feedback based optimization for /bin/sh.

In general, DDs tend to be pretty open to experiments in Debian experimental, so it seems a shame not to take advantage of the usual benefits of an "upstream first" policy.

Ubuntu as a technological playground for Debian

Posted Nov 27, 2010 3:07 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Ubuntus early chromium-browser package and PPA (by Fabien Tassin et al) worked out well for all, I think. The package couldnt be added to Debian so early for copyright reasons, and this early packaging provided an inspiration for the Debian packaging when it came.

Personally the PPA's are one of the major reasons I've switched from Debian to Ubuntu.

Plus Ubuntu's out of the box experience is massively better then Debian's. Even after putting significant work into getting things like PulseAudio working on my Debian laptop it was still not as good as what I got out of Ubuntu by default.

Ubuntu 10.10 is a huge improvement over something like 8.04...

Ubuntu as a technological playground for Debian

Posted Nov 27, 2010 15:06 UTC (Sat) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

One of the reasons PPAs work out so well for cooperation is that the packages tend to install without trouble on Debian systems, too.

I like to think that the distinct out-of-box experiences do not put strain on the relationship and that, like RHEL and Fedora, the two projects are not aggressively competing against each other for users. Roughly speaking, Ubuntu has fewer accessible developers and more users; for those who might want to participate in development by bug reporting, the former would be more important, while for many other people network effects from the latter would be.