Requirements of a VCS packaging tool

[martin f krafft]

also sprach martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> [2008.03.25.2309 +0100]:
> source, that would be a major step, which Ubuntu could not ignore in
> the long run. So while we've found it to be unnecessarily hard to
> work with Ubuntu in the past, this way forward would basically
> impose the burden on them.

Let me clarify this a bit, because I certainly have not given up on
Ubuntu. In fact, I would still very much like to see better
cooperation with Ubuntu. That said, I am also aware and should point
out that several Ubuntu teams work incredibly well with their Debian
counterparts already.

The issue I alluded to is that certain people around Ubuntu keep
asserting how they're doing good and giving back to Debian, when in
fact that's not the general case. But this totally isn't within the
scope of our discussion here, and I don't want to rehash the topic,
to be honest.

I think we need to recognise that Ubuntu is just driven differently
than Debian and Fedora and accept as a fact that they *cannot* do
any more to give back to Debian because they don't have the time
and/or manpower. This is, in large part, because we (Debian) don't
make it easy for them to give back. Filing bugs and attaching
patches is exactly the kind of boring, repetitive and stupid work
that should be left to computers, we shouldn't expect Ubuntu
developers to do that just because their PR team claims that that's
what they're doing.

So assuming that Ubuntu actually wouldn't mind minimising the
patches they have to maintain, I bet that a cross-distro workflow,
which takes different distro needs into account, would help them,
and also make it a lot easier and thus a lot more likely for Ubuntu
to give back to Debian.

Once we're that far, there's no reason to stop at the .deb border,
though, and that's why I would love to see Fedora and others join
in.

Since Ubuntu's solution for the problem right now is Launchpad and
Bazaar, which are unlikely to become widely used in neither, Debian
or Fedora (or others), it's now up to us to figure out a way that's
convincing to all. For then, and that's my somewhat idealist theory,
once Debian and Fedora are working together substantially, Ubuntu
will want to join.

I hope this clears things up.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
tempt not a desperate man.
                                                -- william shakespeare
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