Can we collaborate with Debian better?

[Dima Kogan]

Hello.

I'm a Debian developer, and contribute to Ubuntu only indirectly: by my
contributions to Debian being automatically pulled into Ubuntu. But
since Ubuntu has more users than Debian, most of MY users use the Ubuntu
packages. So I'd like to talk about improving the links between the two
projects. In particular:

1. Debian and Ubuntu both have separate bug trackers. But for most
   Ubuntu packages, there's no "Ubuntu" maintainer: there's just the
   indirect one from Debian. In this case (which is most packages), it's
   unhelpful for the Ubuntu bug tracker to exist as a separate thing. If
   it must exist as a separate thing, those bugs should be forwarded
   automatically to the Debian bug tracker. And updates (including
   status updates) should be ingested back into the Ubuntu tracker. For
   my packages I do try to manually look at the Ubuntu bug reports, but
   I have no rights to close those bugs on launchpad. Probably I can
   sign up somewhere, but as the DEBIAN developer, I shouldn't need to
   do that.

2. As I just discovered, when Ubuntu rebuilds the archive for a release,
   packages that FTBFS are silently dropped. There's no bug report on
   either of the two bug trackers. I'm upstream for a project that has
   been excluded from 24.04 because of this gap in the process. There
   really should be a bug report filed, so that the problem can be fixed
   before the release (what Debian does for their releases). And this
   should be filed on the Debian bug tracker, if that's where the
   maintenance happens.

I don't know how hard the above is, but the current situation isn't
great for either of us.

Related question: is there any way to get my packages included into some
sort of noble "updates", or something like that?

I'm looking at the "mrcal" source package that had an ininteresting
FTBFS bug due to some dependency changing its interface. There was a
Debian bug report filed and quickly fixed, but this happened too late
for noble:

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1067398

The fix is to update the "mrbuild" package to at least 1.9. Is it
possible to get an updated "mrbuild" and "mrcal" into 24.04?

If I'm misinterpreting what's going on, please let me know. Right now I
see this:

  dima at shorty:~$ rmadison -u ubuntu mrbuild | grep noble
   mrbuild | 1.8-1 | noble/universe    | source, all

  dima at shorty:~$ rmadison -u ubuntu libmrcal-dev | grep noble
   libmrcal-dev | 2.4.1-1build1 | noble-proposed/universe    | arm64, ppc64el, riscv64

The latest mrcal IS 2.4.1, but here it's in "noble-proposed" and not for
amd64 for some reason.

Thanks.