Ubuntu is under attack

[Old Rocker]

On Monday 19 December 2005 00:43, Jan Moren wrote:

> What would be the point? I mean, if you want the stability and
> repositories of Debian, well, there it is. Don't install Ubuntu,
> install Debian.

That implies Ubuntu is not Debian, whereas for me a major selling point 
was that it IS a Debian distro.  I was wrong.
>
> Again, actually following Debian would mean older versions of many
> packages, and a major selling point of Ubuntu is precisecly that some
> core packages are much more up to date than the Debian packages are.

I hope I made myself clear in my earlier posts.  Ubuntu uses the 
"unstable" system of packages: nothing wrong with that, because Debian 
allows you to have "stable", "testing" and "unstable" binary packages 
for installation.  If Ubuntu was fully Debian compatible, you could 
download some of the older packages and they would run if the 
dependencies were present.  Its that vision that I want Ubuntu/Kubuntu 
to follow so that Debian doesn't become forked.

I don't know that it is a selling point to have the latest programs 
available to the newbie at the outset.  Surely the selling point on 
this list has been simplicity with programs that do work, and they 
don't always have to be the latest.

> I know I use Ubuntu in no small part because it follows the Gnome
> release schedule and includes very recent versions of a lot of other
> stuff as well (not the least all the tasty kernel-related work, with
> HAL and Dbus, recent drivers and so on). To get there using Debian
> you pretty much have to resort to building things yourself.

Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.  That's not the point: current 
Ubuntu repositories are optimised for Ubuntu-only use.  I understand 
that Debian will hold up moving packages from one repository to another 
because they do not meet Debian's status for all their platforms, 
whereas Ubuntu has more limited platforms to ensure that software meets 
its standards.  But why not include the Debian specific software in 
Ubuntu's repositories, instead of having yet another version of the 
same program?  And why not strive to develop fully Debian compatible 
software in the first place?

>  There is a set of tradeoffs between stability, amount of fully
> supported packages, supported architectures and recency. Ubuntu makes
> a different tradeoff than Debian towards recency. That is _giving_
> people choice, not taking it away.

Well, I disagree, but I will defend your right to be wrong :-)  Ubuntu 
is a good distro, despite what I have said, but it would be a better 
distro IMHO if it was fully Debian compatible.  What I am concerned 
about is a fork in the Debian project that could ultimately bring about 
its end.

-- 

Old Rocker