Steffen: On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Steffen Moeller <moel...@inb.uni-luebeck.de> wrote: > Hello, > > I just received a request to upload a series of packages for Debian that > are already available for Ubuntu. > > Is there a policy document on how to give appropriate credit for the > original work? What if the version we are going to upload is newer than > what is in Ubuntu? If you are basing your package on their work, then I think debian/copyright is an appropriate place to keep track of such historical information. However, if you are instead simply replicating the packages which are packaged for Ubuntu in Debian, then this is neither necessary nor (in my opinion) actually warranted.
Depending on the divergence between Ubuntu and Debian, it might be easier just to start from scratch. I know that with Perl modules in particular, it doesn't take very long to prepare a package (and would indeed take longer to adapt one taken from Ubuntu) > > I am of course strongly suggesting to talk to the Ubuntu maintainers and > hopefully thus start sharing as many file as possible in a common > repository, but no matter if this works out or not - is there anything > special for me to do? I'm not sure how this could work, considering many of the package names in Ubuntu and Debian conflict (sometimes a package is available in Ubuntu but under a different name than that in Debian, or vice versa). Definitely it's important to try to get packages upstream from Ubuntu into Debian if possible, and have Ubuntu sync our packages (they have scripts available for this purpose). However, that requires cooperate Ubuntu Developers to work with you. Where possible, I would strongly advocate moving packages into Debian and having Ubuntu sync from us -- if only because of all the derivatives based on Debian, it would allow them to benefit some from the work of the Ubuntu folk as well. TL;DR version: use debian/copyright. > > Cheers, > > Steffen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
