Collaboration with Debian [was: Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review]

[Martin Pitt]

Robert Ancell [2012-10-17 10:48 +1300]:
> - By updating packages in Debian and waiting for them to flow down to
> Ubuntu kills our velocity. It can change the time from upstream release
> to being in Ubuntu from hours (which is too long in my opinion) to days.

Yes, I agree that this is an issue at times. It usually works
reasonably well for me to upload a new version to Debian and fakesync
it into Ubuntu at the same time, but I have (1) DD upload powers and
(2) everything set up to build packages for Debian, which is not true
for the majority of Ubuntu Desktop developers.

However, at the same time I strongly believe that directly working
on Debian's packaging VCSes has some major benefits: Technically we
avoid duplicate work and potential conflicts (such as naming new
packages slightly differently, or a bug fix independently done on both
sides works in a different way/with different API), and socially it's
a great way of giving something back to Debian in return for having
Debian do the vast majority of work of building Ubuntu. It also avoids
the need of having to wade through large and mostly pointless merge
deltas every so often, a work that nobody is really very fond of.

Would an acceptable compromise be to commit fixes and new releases to
Debian's GNOME svn, but then just do  a -Nubuntu1 upload from those,
at least for the packages which we want to keep in sync by and large?

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)