Ubuntu development...

[Scott James Remnant]

On Sun, 2007-08-26 at 00:26 -0400, Tim Hull wrote:

> 3. Currently, each Ubuntu release is based on a new version of the
> core libraries and toolchain, synced from Debian testing/unstable.
>  While this may mean that each version has the absolute latest and
> greatest, it also makes them more prone to stability issues and breaks
> the ABI every 6 months, which ends up requiring users to update more
> often because they want to run program X and the version they need is
> compiled against the new version Y of glibc.  Why not base Ubuntu on
> Debian stable+backports (for latest GNOME, KDE, kernel, Firefox, OO.o,
> etc) instead?
> 
This is a common misconception.

In fact, for a large number of packages in main, especially those
installed by default in the Desktop task, we maintain them ourselves
based on the original Debian packaging but updated to the current
upstream released version.

Remember, a new version brings just as many, if not more, bug fixes than
it does new problems.

glibc has an almost zero number of ABI breakages (I'm not aware of one
in its recent history), updating this means that we support the latest
software from vendors whilst *still* supporting software compiled for
warty.  Our packaging system is more strict about this, of course; but
that's not a problem with glibc.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
Ubuntu Development Manager
scott at ubuntu.com
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