Control file in tertiary description - “fully supported”

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Hi Marcia

There's a lot to unpack here.

On Sun, 2023-08-13 at 21:07 -0400, Marcia Wilbur wrote:
> Hi. I couldn’t help but notice the description in the control file of
> the tertiary Deb.
> 
> Where it states, this package depends on all the educational software
> for tertiary grade level education that is fully supported by
> canonical in the edubuntu community
> 
> What exactly is meant by fully supported? 
> What kind of support have you provided in the past?
> Maybe dev or qa for  defects or bugs?
> 
> For example, one of the packages listed in the control file as
> recommends not depends, but recommends, is Dia.
> 
> How do you support a user who is having a problem finding an option?
> Do you send them to the dia support or do you manage this yourselves?
> Do you contribute developers for bugs or defects? Do you have a
> bounty program or perhaps donate to the project?
> 
> I’m just wondering what is meant by fully supported. thanks
> 

First of all, a little history.

That control file was revived and largely unedited from its original
form from 9+ years ago, and when it was originally written, all of the
software may very well have been fully supported by Canonical.
Unfortunately, I wasn't around at that time, so I can't speak to that.
However, I can speak to where it is at currently.

Edubuntu, formerly known as Ubuntu for Education, was spun-off into a
community project around 2009 and is no longer developed by Canonical.
Additionally, in 2014, its final version (14.04) was released before it
went into a "maintenance mode" of sorts and was deprecated until my
wife and I revived it. Part of that revival included bringing back much
of what existed previously, including the control file for the
metapackages (the source is edubuntu-meta) which is created from a
seed. Getting the seed to build into the .iso image and the
metapackages was priortity more than getting the descriptions updated.

Edubuntu, however, is not its own project as it is a flavor of Ubuntu
and doesn't exist as a separate distribution from Ubuntu. Ubuntu's
repositories exist as follows:

* Main (officially supported by Canonical, Free and Open Source
Software)
* Universe (Community Supported, Free and Open Source Software)
* Multiverse (Community and Canonical Supported, Non-Free [proprietary]
Open Source Software)
* Restricted (Proprietary/3rd-Party Supported Trusted Software)

Edubuntu is built from a mix of Main, Universe, and Multiverse. For
instance, Dia is found in the Universe repository (community support),
but gnome-calculator is found in the Main repository (Canonical
support).

Items listed as Depends and Recommends in control files of packages
simply list what packages are in relationship to each other. Recommends
are simply soft-dependencies, meaning they can be removed without
breaking the package that soft-depended (recommended) them. If they
were listed as Depends, then if they are removed they also remove the
package that depended them. This is outlined in the Debian Packaging
basics here: Chapter 7. Basics of the Debian package management
system By the way, as a packager myself, this is something I had to
spend a couple years learning.

Bugs get filed via Launchpad and (hopefully) get reported to the
upstream developers, but that's not always guaranteed. Sometimes bug
triagers, if they remember to do so, will recommend to the reporter to
file the bug upstream to Debian (since the vast majority of our
packages come sync'd from Debian each development cycle), and if it's
not just Debian and Ubuntu that's affected, then to the upstream
developer. Part of getting a bug fixed, and reporting a bug, is to be
willing to go all the way to report the bug. The vast majority of the
time people will report bugs to the distribution and consider it "not
my problem anymore, it's theirs to fix now" when that's not true
because at that point they're still consuming. If one wishes to
contribute by reporting bugs, that's how they contribute, not consume.

I hope that helps clarify. I'm sorry if the descriptions were
confusing, we can definitely get that cleared-up before 23.10.
Remember, 23.04 was the first release in 9 years and it's not even a
long-term support release.

--
Erich Eickmeyer
Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio
Technical Lead - Edubuntu
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