Ubuntu is under attack (longish)

[Old Rocker]

On Monday 19 December 2005 09:42, Anders Karlsson wrote:

> I don't get your, or Mike's, gripe. On one hand, you don't want
> Debian for some reason, but when Ubuntu does not do exactly what
> Debian does, there is something terrible going on and Ubuntu is under
> attack. On the other hand, when you have installed Ubuntu, you are
> making every effort to include as much of Debian as you can, editing
> sources.list and installing this and that from the Debian
> repositories, and then it is Ubuntu's fault when it breaks?

One aspect of the philosophy of the Debian system is that the packages 
are in various repositories which signify their stability, and that all 
packages should be available with their dependencies.  Ubuntu is 
supposed to be part of the Debian system, which means that all packages 
should be available.

You are talking as though Ubuntu is a completely different type of 
distro to Debian, which makes Ubuntu non-Debian.  In other words, it is 
a fork in Debian.  Much better to make Ubuntu a better installer and 
better front end to the Debian packages.

It is Ubuntu's fault when fully compatible Debian packages break due to 
their not being compatible with the main core, because that is NOT why 
Debian was set up.  You should be able to edit the sources.list in 
apt-get and set pinning to ensure you get packages from the 
repositories you want; this is why it was included in apt-get.

Now, if your argument is that Ubuntu and Kubuntu are fine and its just 
as you want, I can understand that.  However, I am concerned that the 
Debian system is being forked while this is happening.  As part of the 
open source community we should be working towards making less 
proliferation of the same packages, and making those packages better; 
wouldn't it be better if Ubuntu worked with the same packages as the 
Debian system?  Then we could all use the same packages....

In a recent article in the UK magazine "Linux Format" this was said:

"There is tension between the Debian Project and its offspring, 
particularly the recent offshoot Ubuntu.  Debian developers have 
debated whether Ubuntu is actually a derivative or a more dangerous 
fork, and whether Ubuntu developers do enough to feed their changes 
back to Debian package maintainers."

I'm not sure if that last point is true, but its a red flag, a pointer, 
to dangers ahead if Ubuntu and Debian continue to diverge.  It is 
certain that Ubuntu's development has all the signs of being a fork, 
which would be dangerous for the whole Debian community.

-- 

Old Rocker