New Launchpad feature: Diff between Sid and Oneiric

[Julian Edwards]

On Thursday 16 June 2011 21:08:44 Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 03:23:57PM +0100, Julian Edwards wrote:
> > On Thursday 16 June 2011 14:08:14 Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> > > * is the current page only tracking Debian unstable? GNOME3 is in
> > > experimental still in Debian and for desktop work we are interested to
> > > track experimental and not unstable, is there any way to do that?
> > 
> > Each series can only track one set of parent distros at once,
> > unfortunately. We did put in a way of changing to a different parent
> > when opening a new series, which will be useful for LTSes.
> 
> The particular workflow Sebastien is referring to here is that
> frequently, on a case-by-case basis, we want to sync from Debian's
> experimental tree to pull in changes they're not yet ready to put into
> unstable but that we know we want in Ubuntu.  (With Debian being more of
> a rolling release, and Ubuntu more puctuated with freezes and more
> tightly cadenced releases, this use case does crop up fairly regularly.)

Ah fair enough.  We don't cater well for that case at all right now.  We did 
assume it would not crop up very often but it seems that was an incorrect 
assumption.  Where it does happen we figured that someone could just do a 
regular upload so it wasn't a blocker, but I guess it'll get annoying.  
Perhaps we'll fix this in a future iteration on the feature.

> I do notice this bit in the LEP, which suggests some thought has gone
> into this (or a similar?) situation:
> 
>   * Allow a derived distribution to have more than one parent
>     + Post-initialisation, add more parents so that they appear in the
>       list of differences

This is for the OEM case, where they have a crazy-ass hierarchy of parent 
overlay distros! :)