[Utnubu-discuss] Collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian on the Ubuntu side: a proposal

[Hamish Moffatt]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:20:59AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 24/01/06 at 16:14 +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > I think some additional requirements of the MOTUs are also needed;
> > while the DCT page describes "mode 1" being Ubuntu developers submitting
> > to the Debian BTS on a volunteer basis, Debian developers are already
> > expected to do better than that when working with their upstream.
> > I think more needs to be expected of the MOTUs.
> 
> The problem here is that you are discussing policy ("are expected to")
> while I would like to discuss implementable stuff. Having a page
> somewhere saying "Ubuntu developers are expected to file bugs in the
> Debian BTS for every they fix which could also apply to Debian" would be
> useless if not enforced.

OK, true.

I see the wiki page has been revised. I like the ideas there now- DCT
being a team on the Ubuntu side who will establish better communication
with developers who are willing to commit to being responsive in return.

I think this is reasonable and am happy to commit to that with regard to
my packages. However I reserve the right to disagree with requested
changes AND this doesn't mean I welcome NMUs to implement this.
Is that acceptable?

> > For example, Ubuntu contained (until recently) a newer upstream version
> > of package xastir than Debian, which was requested by a Ubuntu user.
> > I would have been reasonably happy to make that change in Debian and
> > thus this would have meant Ubuntu developers did not need to do anything
> > expect pass on the request in the form of a bug report. Admittedly it
> > would only be a few minutes work to prepare the new version, but if you
> > do that on a few hundred packages it adds up.
> 
> The worst part of it is happens when MOTUs have to merge the two
> packages (newversion-1 from debian and newversion-0ubuntu1 from ubuntu).
> I don't like this situation, and would prefer it to be avoided as often
> as possible. But some Debian maintainers have proven to be unresponsive
> regarding new upstream versions, so Ubuntu devs don't always have the
> choice.

Understood, although there was no attempt to contact me in this case. I
would certainly have considered the request. I imagine that you might
need to maintain a blacklist of unresponsive maintainers but would
prefer that to a whitelist.


Regards
Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish at debian.org> <hamish at cloud.net.au>