Debian Wants To Work With Its Offspring (Ubuntu)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Wants To Work With Its Offspring (Ubuntu)

Earlier this week at DebConf there was a discussion about Debian derivatives so that Debian's offspring could share their experiences and also for the Debian developers to share various derivative-related initiatives. Some friction between Debian and distributions based upon it (namely Ubuntu) were exposed...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzOTQ

[bug!]

- It's been hard to get fixes in Debian stable due to "the culture of maintainers not caring about stable."

That is not true.

New features aren't added to Stable, bug fixes are.

maintainers not caring about stable

I think you must understand that maintainers do not have to care that much about stable, as the package that gets into stable, is pretty darn stable...
Only on rare occasions it is required to apply a fix, and then it gets applied pretty fast.

You may want to read how the whole stable/testing/unstable works before judging.

[Michael]

You may want to read how the whole stable/testing/unstable works before judging.

I'm simply stating the facts of what was said during the DebConf BoF. From the official notes:

RC bug fixes in stable is hard to get, culture of maintainers not caring about stable.

[bug!]

Ah yes, I misread, sorry!

[Kano]

You get certainly security updates and if you use debian stable on a desktop you can use debian backport repository as well - or you can use kanotix and you get even more updates.

[schmidtbag]

as the package that gets into stable, is pretty darn stable...

That's debatable. As I've said in a previous topic, some (not all) packages in Debian are considered stable just because they're old. That mainly applies to DEs.

[brent]

There's definitely some truth about maintainers not caring. A few years ago, I wanted to use Dovecot on Debian. Debian stable shipped an old beta version (!) with a few patches to fix the worst bugs, but I still had a lot of trouble with it. The maintainer just shrugged it off with a "works for me"! In the end, I simply build the stable version of Dovecot myself, and it worked perfectly fine.

IMHO the very strict update policies of Debian do not make much sense.

[bwat47]

There's definitely some truth about maintainers not caring. A few years ago, I wanted to use Dovecot on Debian. Debian stable shipped an old beta version (!) with a few patches to fix the worst bugs, but I still had a lot of trouble with it. The maintainer just shrugged it off with a "works for me"! In the end, I simply build the stable version of Dovecot myself, and it worked perfectly fine.

IMHO the very strict update policies of Debian do not make much sense.

yeah, old != stable.

[Glenn101]

I am wondering why Ubuntu does not work to remain compatible with Debian packages? That is one of the many reasons I do not use Ubuntu.

Glenn

[vertexSymphony]

That's debatable. As I've said in a previous topic, some (not all) packages in Debian are considered stable just because they're old. That mainly applies to DEs.

Yes !!!, highly debatable ... I found it to be painfully bleeding "true" with an old version of nouveau being loaded, considered "stable", but, no ... just old, newer version were moar stable.
truth is that fixes for bugs go to mainline, and backporting fixes applied on top of a highly modified source is at the very least expensive (not necessarily a monetary "expensiveness"), to actually impossible.

So I kinda always say how such a fallacy is correlating the oldness with stable(ness), and that's one of my main points of criticism towards Debian (even if I'm actually writing from it).
That's the reason I describe as "oldstable" the the "stable" version of Debian whenever someone mentions the word "stable" in a "Debian context"

Regards.