Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison

Posted Aug 12, 2009 7:25 UTC (Wed) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035)
In reply to: Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison by drag
Parent article: Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison

Ideally what should happen is that Ubuntu and Debian remain compatible enough that they can share the same repositories.

Remember that Ubuntu is only based on Debian (unstable, by the way) on the source-package level. They rebuild revery package against their own toolchain, which in general makes it unsuitable to be installed on a Debian system (and vice-versa).

Now that library dependencies are more fine-grained on the symbol level via dpkg-gensymbols, it might get easier to share binary packages (e.g. most C programs do not use features of glibc-2.8 or above, and will now only declare a Depends on, say, glibc-2.3.6), but that will have to be seen.

Probably another factor in wasted possibilities for collaboration was Launchpad: from the outside, it looked like Ubuntu developers (at least those employed by Canonical) were suggested to use Launchpad for things like packaging. On the other hand, Debian Developers could rarely be convinced to use Launchpad due to its non-freeness. Maybe this will change now as well, however there is still the somewhat incompatible choice of VCS (svn/git on the Debian side, bzr on the Ubuntu side).

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Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:56 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> Remember that Ubuntu is only based on Debian (unstable, by the way) on the source-package level. They rebuild revery package against their own toolchain, which in general makes it unsuitable to be installed on a Debian system (and vice-versa).

I don't know how much truth is in that really. In what ways are the code generated by the toolchains incompatible?

For example I've installed Chrome and a few other programs from Ubuntu's PPA on Debian and that worked just fine.

I know that for Opera offers dozens and dozens different packages for different distros.... but if you look at what is in them they all use the same binaries and install the same libraries to the same locations. Checksums and everything matches. There are a only a few different files, mostly minor things to do with packaging and the only different binary that is supplied is one for very old versions of Ubuntu that have use a different GCC C++ ABI.

Is it really neccessary for every program to be built using the same exact versions of GCC and whatnot?