Ubuntu is under attack (longish)
Anders Karlsson
trudheim at gmail.com
Mon Dec 19 15:45:04 UTC 2005
On 12/19/05, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Anders Karlsson wrote:
> > Ubuntu tries to maintain a closeness to Ubuntu, but from what I have
> > read, gives no guarantee about being 100% compatible.
>
> If Ubuntu can't maintain 100% compatibility with Ubuntu, we're in
> trouble :-) (yeah, I know you meant "Debian" in the second case).
And I thought I was doing so well.. Freudian slips and all that. :)
> Definitely. Apt pinning is available to allow _advanced_ (_very_ advanced)
> users to use packages not otherwise available _at their own risk_. I've
> used it for years. I'm never comfortable with it, and I always assume that
> it's the pinning that's at the root of any apt problem I have (and the
> assumption almost always turns out to be correct).
I have messed about with pinning as well, but usually only after
either talking to a debian maintainer (had the pleasure of working
with one a while back) or after reading very detailed howto's. I try
very hard not to have to resort to pinning. And with Ubuntu, that has
been very easy to stick to. :)
> Ubuntu may not be strictly a fork, because every change they make is
> presented upstream to Debian, and Debian uses many (most?) of them. Then
> Ubuntu merges Debian and discards any of their own patches that have been
> adopted upstream. However, there are certainly some packages that will
> probably never again be identical to Debian and the number of such will
> likely increase - I guess it's a fork when you finally decide to keep your
> source trees entirely separate. Anyway, Ubuntu _does_ try to make Debian
> packages better - however, sometimes Debian maintainers and Ubuntu
> maintainers aren't going to agree on the definition of "better".
Breezy and Etch are quite close as I have understood it. Dapper is
similar to Sid, for the moment. But they are never a 100% match.
Ubuntu and Debian have different goals, I thought that was clear, but
this thread showed how wrong that assumption was.
Perhaps there need to be word from the core team to clarify the obvious?
Regards,
--
Anders Karlsson <trudheim at gmail.com>
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