I've read a lot about the binary incompatibility concern between Debian and Ubuntu. I have an idea, but I don't have the skill to implement it myself. I figured it would be useful to throw it out there for you all to scrutinize, determine the implementation feasibility, and perhaps run with.
First of all, I think it is useful to analyze Ubuntu's motivation -- releasing well-integrated bleeding-edge software. The easiest way to accomplish this goal is by branching from sid. This means that Ubuntu libraries differ from the stable Debian release. Hence, Debian stable (and sid/testing) packages are incompatible with the Ubuntu libraries; thus creating the need for duplicate packaging work by both the Ubuntu and Debian communities. I think that Ubuntu's motivation to provide the latest software is reasonable; however, I think that Debian may be able to help to support that goal while making it possible to maintain binary compatibility. The solution would be to convince Ubuntu to branch from stable instead of sid. The problem is that this creates a lot of work for Ubuntu because they have to backport all of the desired bleeding-edge stuff. However, Debian developers could work with and contribute more to backports.org making it easier for Ubuntu. The most problematic software will be GNOME because it depends on the latest GTK which depends on newer low level libs, which would mean all of the above would need to be backported -- probably quite a significant undertaking. Maybe a solution would be to force the sid GNOME release (and hence the upstream GNOME) to use the Debian stable GTK. Obviously this would have some major political issues. How can we tell upstream what libraries they can and cannot use? Hardware support would be another issue. There would need to be a way to backport support for newer hardware, which may involve backporting newer kernels or backporting support for newer hardware into the stable kernel. The problem is that this solution is hard work for Debian, and I don't think that Ubuntu would take on the backporting challenge itself. It also means making backports.org an official Debian archive. The only way that this would work is if there are Debian folks willing to spend the time to work on backports of their packages. And there would need to be coordination with Ubuntu to determine which packages require backporting, and which can be kept as is. Well, anyway, these are my thoughts. I'm not a developer, and thus cannot see the issues beyond those described, and cannot take on this work myself, but I think that compatibility is a very desirable goal -- not only for Debian and Ubuntu, but for providing a stable platform for external software development on GNU/Linux. All too often I hear about "we don't support Linux because it's a moving platform," and "we can only support one version, so we choose red hat enterprise 3". I think thats rediculous. I think we can make it possible for software developers to create one release that will run on all distributions. One final open-ended question is: which consumes more resources? Duplicate packaging or backporting? I look forward to any insight and contributions. Mike Gilbert
