Rogério Brito wrote: > The Ubuntu people are synchronizing their work with Debian all the time
Ubuntu has a general policy of not sending patches back to Debian developers. They make their patches available on a website in lumps[1] of varying utility and expect Debian to go look at them and integrate them back in. This doesn't work as well as some other techniques could. Most of the cases of Ubuntu patches being integrated back into Debian are cases where: a. The Ubuntu developer is a maintainer of the Debian package. b. A Debian developer has spare time to go look at patches that might or might not be even applicable to Debian. c. Possibly the utnubu (note spelling) project filtered a patch back from Ubuntu to Debian. Ubuntu is continuing to diverge radically from Debian on several fronts. I'm actually beginning to lose hope that it will be reasonable to consider it as a Debian derived distribution at all soon. > It is frequent the case in Debian where you file a bug (sometimes of > high relevance *and* with a patch ready for comsumption) and the > maintainer just sits there, doing nothing, sometimes for *way* more than > one year. > > Do you want me to provide you with concrete examples or do you want them > spoon-fed to you? > > This is frustrating to say the least. The solution that Debian has been > adopting (as an evolution) is team-maintainership (see the vrms project > on both the BTS and on svn.debian.org to see what I mean---actually see > almost anything on alioth.debian.org and you'll get what I mean). Actually Debian has had a tradition of NMUs for much longer than team maintenance. All you have to do is bring a real bug to another developer's attention. (Which, it's worth noting, you were able to do with vrms. :-P) -- see shy jo [1] With http://packages.qa.debian.org/b/base-config.html being the canonical example. If you look at the patches section of this page you'll see that we link to the Ubuntu patch. Which is 1.5 megabytes of all sorts of changes, and nearly impossible to use. We also link to the more usual patches in the Debian bug tracking system, which are small targeted patches and as you can see tend to be applied on a regular basis.
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