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Eugene V. Lyubimkin | 16 Mar 2012 10:15

Gergely and Wouter: the level of independence from other distributions?

Hello,

Do you think Debian project has enough manpower to differ (if needed)
with other major derivatives and major non-derivatives in the important
non-Debian-specific software choices? Would you want Debian to borrow
more from and share more with other distributions for the ease of maintenance
and uniformity, or rather don't look on others and make the choices
independently?

--

-- 
Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, JID: jackyf.devel(maildog)gmail.com
C++/Perl developer, Debian Developer

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Wouter Verhelst | 16 Mar 2012 15:13

Re: Gergely and Wouter: the level of independence from other distributions?

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 11:15:59AM +0200, Eugene V. Lyubimkin wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Do you think Debian project has enough manpower to differ (if needed)
> with other major derivatives and major non-derivatives in the important
> non-Debian-specific software choices? Would you want Debian to borrow
> more from and share more with other distributions for the ease of maintenance
> and uniformity, or rather don't look on others and make the choices
> independently?

Before implementing something, a distribution should decide what it
thinks is the right way of doing something, with very little regard of
what other distributions are doing (if anything).

After having made that decision, it makes a lot of sense to look at
other distributions.

If what Debian thinks is right just happens to be in line with what some
random other distribution thinks is right, then that's great and it
would be silly not to coordinate. Such coordination can happen on many
levels: individual Debian package maintainers can talk and coordinate
with packagers from other distributions and/or with upstreams, sending
patches back and forth; people in distribution leadership positions can
talk with eachother and see where they can cooperate more; teams working
on smaller parts of distributions can compare notes with similar teams
in other distributions; etcetera.

Should we try to do this more? Yes. Getting people to coordinate and
cooperate more is a job that'll probably never be finished; there will
always be that something extra we can do. We should, if it makes sense

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Gergely Nagy | 17 Mar 2012 11:50

Re: Gergely and Wouter: the level of independence from other distributions?

Hi!

"Eugene V. Lyubimkin" <jackyf <at> debian.org> writes:

> Do you think Debian project has enough manpower to differ (if needed)
> with other major derivatives and major non-derivatives in the important
> non-Debian-specific software choices?

Probably, yes. But being different just for the sake of it is not
something I would like to see (see below for an explanation), let alone
encourage.

> Would you want Debian to borrow more from and share more with other
> distributions for the ease of maintenance and uniformity, or rather
> don't look on others and make the choices independently?

I'll touch on the sharing part first: I think we're doing a good job
there. It could certainly be improved, but nevertheless, I believe that
what we do, by working with upstreams (which indirectly helps other
distributions aswell), and by continously improving our packaging (from
which derivatives benefit a lot: there is a huge amount of packages
shipped with Ubuntu, for example, that are pretty much just rebuilds of
the Debian package). We also have maintainers who are also maintainers
in derivatives, which is also a kind of sharing (and borrowing).

As for borrowing.. that's a trickier question. I do not believe we
should blindly follow other distributions, but becoming different just
for the sake of it is counterproductive. If another distribution comes
up with a good idea, we should evaluate it too, and see if we can borrow
it, if it's worth borrowing.

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