On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 08:58:19PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote: > On 29/01/12 18:38, Jeremy Bicha wrote: > > Mark, you were surprised that a significant number of developers don't > > consider the partner repository part of Ubuntu. In addition to what > > Laney has pointed out, /etc/apt/sources.list has for years said: ## > > Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## > > 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is > > offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to > > Ubuntu users. [...] > Well, that's a poor choice of words.
Those were probably my words, albeit mostly copied-and-pasted from elsewhere (ultimately, the ancestry of this phrasing probably goes back to "non-free is not part of Debian" ...). They do seem unnecessarily negative, so I'm happy to adjust them somehow. However, like others responding to this thread, I find it very difficult to consider partner to be "part of Ubuntu" in a way that has much meaning to me. Part of the Ubuntu ecosystem, yes; affiliated with Ubuntu, yes; built for use with Ubuntu, yes; presented to Ubuntu users, yes; important to the success of Ubuntu, yes; but actually part of Ubuntu, I just find that tough to fit into my mental model of things. For example, I'd been given to understand (albeit from a while back) that partner was due to migrate to a PPA at some point; PPAs are all those things as well, but I didn't think we considered them to be part of Ubuntu in general. Partner feels like a privileged kind of PPA to me more than anything else. You've made it very clear in this thread that you understand it differently, and presumably that you always did; but, without wanting to put words in anyone's mouth, my impression is that there's been a common understanding at variance to this among all the Ubuntu developers I've spoken to on the subject for some years, both within Canonical and without. I can't remember any public guidance to the contrary before this thread, and given that it's on archive.canonical.com, we often refer to it as the "Canonical partner archive" or similar, and that it behaves pretty much like a Canonical PPA in all but name, I don't think it's surprising that this shared understanding has come to be. We don't need to invoke any fundamental conflict between Canonical and the Ubuntu community to explain this, especially when Iain went out of his way to stress that he does consider it a valuable service. This is more about a sense of the mental model of "Ubuntu" that's perfectly natural for developers to acquire, particularly when e.g. we reinforce it by telling Ubuntu core developers that they are "collectively responsible for the maintenance of all packages in Ubuntu" (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers#CoreDev). That makes it quite natural for those developers to feel a sense of co-ownership of the idea, which seems like a healthy thing to encourage (indeed: "feel a sense of personal responsibility for the quality of Ubuntu releases and for the satisfaction of Ubuntu users" - I'd be worried if developers *didn't* have strong feelings about what Ubuntu meant and their ability to improve it!). In the cause of reducing conflict, I wonder if this is a distinction we simply don't need to make. As Allison points out, a name like "Ubuntu" means different things in different contexts, and it's cumbersome to have to keep spelling out which one we mean, not to mention that the discussion about whether something is part of Ubuntu or not is by its very nature divisive. The remix guidelines say "In general, a Remix can have applications from the Ubuntu archives added"; the plural "archives" is in the original text. The point of the remix guidelines, as I remember it, was (a) to ensure a certain basic level of quality, associated with our ability to remove packages from the archive that didn't meet our quality standards, and (b) to ensure that the degree of difference between stock Ubuntu and any given remix would always be small enough that the difficulty of dealing with bug reports and the like about remixes wouldn't get out of control. In short, to preserve our good name, to keep the whole system more or less comprehensible, and to encourage important infrastructural changes to happen as part of Ubuntu itself. Now, partner is small; the TB-approved rules for it (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ExtensionRepositoryPolicy - Scott R, from what you said I think you perhaps weren't aware of this) are intended to ensure a certain basic level of quality and gatekeeping; and we already present them to Ubuntu users, so the general idea that a remix is more or less something you could get by starting up Ubuntu and fiddling about in Software Center a bit hasn't been broken. Aside from the issue of establishing suitable distribution agreements, I'm not sure it would be unreasonable to simply say that this is something remixes can include, provided that they make it clear to their users that the result is not entirely free software (or similar wording) and that redistribution might involve special effort. (It isn't even terribly clear to me from the current guidelines that this would be prohibited, but obviously reasonable people currently disagree; and I do think it's important to require redistribution terms to be made crystal clear when they differ from those of the standard editions of Ubuntu, both for all the usual reasons and to avoid confusing the public into believing that restrictive terms might apply to Ubuntu as well.) Similarly, I don't see why remixes couldn't include packages from extras more or less at will. Extras didn't exist when the remix guidelines were formulated, but it has a clear technical policy attached to it, and it's already presented to Ubuntu users; by the same argument as above, it seems a perfectly reasonable thing for remixes to include packages from that extension repository. The guidelines already say straight out that remixes are "not in fact Ubuntu as distributed by the Ubuntu project", so there's no issue of something that is Ubuntu including something that isn't, or any weird semantics like that. I think an approach like this could resolve the situation for this particular remix without having to go down a particular line of argument that obviously makes some Ubuntu contributors feel uncomfortable. -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
