missing packages in universe?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 03:03:00PM +0200, Stefan Kluth wrote:

> I tried "digikam" (KDE photo management).  Installing kde went fine
> without trouble (very nice actually!).  Running in kde, "apt-get install
> digikam" failed.  I resorted to "apt-get buildeps digikam" which worked
> (good!).  The build broke with a trivial source code problem present in
> digikam in debian/unstable at the time you took your snapshot.  After
> fixing the bug digikam build, installed and run ok.  Then I got the source
> from debian unstable and the bug was fixed there already.  So a trivial
> fix for digikam in ubuntu would be to replace your source with the one
> from debian.

Thanks for looking into it.  It should be no problem to bring in the new
version from unstable; you can expect it to be updated soon.

> After these two examples I have a more general and perhaps naiive
> question: why don't you snapshot debian testing instead of unstable as a
> starting point for your releases?  That would imply a start from a more
> stable system with fewer problems of the kind discussed above.

We start from unstable in order to give ourselves the freedom to make our
own decisions with regard to release management, independent of Debian's
release-in-preparation.  This is necessary because our release criteria are
very different from Debian's.

As a simple example, a package might be excluded from Debian 'testing' due
to a build failure on any of the 11 architectures supported by Debian
'sarge', but it is still suitable for Ubuntu if it builds and works on only
three of them.  A package will also be prevented from entering Debian
'testing' if it has release-critical bugs according to Debian criteria, but
a bug which is release-critical for Debian may not be as important for
Ubuntu.

-- 
 - mdz