ubuntu braindump

We had some interesting discussion on Planet Debian today. OtherJoey® wondered why Ubuntu has been able to release, while Debian 3.0r3 has not. Keybuck pointed out that stable point releases and Ubuntu releases have little in common. This does sort of beg the question of why Ubuntu has been able to release while sarge has not. There are some obvious reasons like smaller focus and being able to move faster, but is Ubuntu hurting or helping Debian overall? Well, probably both..

I haven't really written much about Ubuntu and my feelings about it and indeed my relationship to it. Mainly because I've been taking a wait and see approach on some things. Partly because I am probably the closest thing there is to a Canonical employee without actually being one, having been almost involved at the very beginning (until I made a different choice) and having spent time in real life with the whole group despite not working there. So I've not wanted to talk too much about it before. Anyway, I've not reached many firm conclusions, so much of the following is half-formed opinions that should probably be given little credance.

First, a gripe. I've been occasionally annoyed to see Debian developers (who are not employed by Canonical) installing Ubuntu instead of trying the distribution that they're supposed to be contributors to. Mostly because I feel that many problems in Debian could be better dealt with if more developers cared about how well the installation process went, and about how well the installed system worked, and what was in testing/stable, instead of just running their unstable systems and recommending using the commerical derivative de jour to others. When DD's do install Debian and get interested in that, things tend to improve. Fast. And of course I've put some work in over the past year on these issues, to the point that I'm actually happy with Debian's installer and happy with the default Debian desktop install. So it's personally annoying to me, though quite understandable, to read about Debian developers installing Ubuntu, recommending it to friends and family, etc.

Of course we hope that the additional work that Canonical has done on polishing the desktop and other things will be merged back into Debian. I don't know for sure if their patch directory is complete, but most of those have resulted in Debian bug reports with a good chance to be merged in. I've seen some of this happen first hand in the installer; we've gotten a fair number of patched from Ubuntu. I also know of a few patches in Ubuntu's installer that have not been fed back to Debian. Some of these patches look Ubuntu specific but really shouldn't be. Some of them are just buggy. Most of them are quite good.

I'd characterise Ubuntu's progress at feeding patches to Debian to be head and shoulders above any other commercial derived Debian distro I've worked with, and on a par with the best of the non-commercial CDDs (such as debian-br, debian-np, debian-edu, debian-med, etc). It's sure a lot nicer to get mail from a developer with a unified diff, rather than pulling apart binary .debs from a derived distribution who did not even tell me they modified my program, to see what they changed.

I feel like an utter nitpicker to say this, but there is a certian lack of followthrough in some cases; they could do better at repeatedly reminding some of us to apply their patches instead of sending a one-off bug report. (Though it's not as if Debian's any better at forwarding our patches upstream.) Probably they will have some incentive to do this if they re-branch from unstable for their next release and have to get all their patches applied again. Also, I'd rather see them more assertive about applying obviously correct patches in the cases where they are co-maintainers of the patched package anyway (hi, Kamion!).

One area in which they could improve is keeping us appraised of general Debian bugs that happen to be filed in their BTS. Several times recently I've learned of a bug and only later learned that it was already in their BTS. Sometimes this goes the other way too. As Ubuntu gains users, I've been noticing other information pop up on their site which has a broader bearing on Debian, for example this hardware compatability info on their wiki probably applies to d-i in general. I assume that if I had time to follow their mailing lists and irc I'd find even more valuable information. This is the kind of thing where a fork can easily end up costing Debian developers and users more time or less information. It's probably unavoidable.

I was unhappy to read of one Canonical employee and Debian developer who didn't have a Debian system anymore. He can set up a chroot, but that's really not going to be the same, and if many of the fine Debian developers hired by Canonical come to prefer using their own distro exclusively then I wonder how much incentive and interest they'll have to contribute to Debian going forward. That could be a fairly bad turn for Debian, because we strongly rely on many of the Canonical employees in their capacity as Debian developers. And it's not as if the same thing hasn't happened before with DD's who got involved in past distributions, like Storm. I suspect this particular case is not permanant and isn't due to any division from Debian but it could happen, and it's something to keep an eye on.

One of the reasons I do not work for Canonical is because I was worried at the time that a job there would not leave me enough time for d-i and Debian work. That was probably a false concern. The other reason, that I didn't want such a high pressure job, seems to have been spot on. So of course I've been interested to see whether working on Ubuntu will force some Canonical employees to cut back their work on Debian. Some of the people working for Canonical are as much my co-workers as folks working on the CDD that employs me. I work with them literally every day on a close basis and we have spent weeks this year working together in person. And if anything I've seen a lot more involvement from them in Debian than before. Although their unavailable periods seem to come in larger blocks due to certian .. craziness .. in their schedules, their overall availability seems better to me. Although I do wish Elmo could spend less time in London.

Wrapping up, I still have concerns and areas of uncertainty, and things I want to keep an eye on WRT Canonical and Debian. I have my ambivilances about this particular veritety of fork as opposed to others we've seen. I know that the Debian developers working for Canonical actually care about doing things right, and have probably some of the same concerns as I, as well as having the kind of feelings for Debian (both pro and con) that only long-term Debian developers can have. I hope they've given some of these things more thought than I have as a relative outsider, and I'll just wait and see how it goes, while mercilessly exploiting them as much as I can. ;-)