[Utnubu-discuss] Utnubu and collaborative maintenance with Ubuntu MOTU

[Stephan Hermann]

Good Morning, well, if it's a good morning when you read Joeys post to d-d and 
ubuntu-motu list.

I'm including ubuntu-motu list for this post, because it's quite important for 
everybody.


On Monday 16 January 2006 22:48, Philipp Kern wrote:
> Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > I'm not sure ubuntu-motu is the right list for this. Some MOTUs prefer
> > not to care about Debian [...]
>
> Although I agree with your statement that ubuntu-motu is not the right
> list, the last bit really pisses me off. I hope they package their stuff
> by themselves then and do not just take the work of others. (Yes, I did
> truncate the part about the mail flood and yes, it is Free Software, so
> everybody could do with it what he wants.) I wouldn't dare to talk about
> the "we sync back" thing...

Ok, Iwrote yesterday a private mail to Raphael, where I stated my concerns 
about the MOTU team as debain maintainer.

I quote the part here which is important to me:

"
the objection I have is only to change the responsibilities of the core motu 
team. 
In my POV the core MOTU team can't be the maintainer (if this is decided 
somehow), because the responsibilities right now are Ubuntu, and not fixing 
bugs in packages coming from ubuntu but running on debian.

I would like to see a new team, which can be utnubu, utnubu-motu or whatever, 
where people can subscribe and working on this afford.

Rational behind this: People are joining MOTU because of Ubuntu, People are 
joining Debian, because of Debian. If I, as MOTU, fix a bug in a package 
which came from Debian, I'm doing it for Ubuntu, and not for Debian. 
The same happens the other way around. 

So, seeing this as "fact", and seeing that some people are not working with a 
plain debian installation (stable, unstable, testing), we, as MOTU team, 
can't tell them "hey, your reponsibility is from today on to fix debian bugs 
from packages which were first in ubuntu but now they are as well in debian".

But this is a social problem, which we have to solve internally for the MOTU 
and/or for Ubuntu as a whole.
"

> OTOH Ubuntu profits very much from improvements in Debian. I saw people
> suggesting Ubuntu rather than Debian because of d-i. Perhaps they should
> also get the "collaboration, not confrontation" with Debian bit. And no,
> \sh, again, you are not my target here.

I think that all Ubuntu folks know, that without Debian, no Ubuntu would 
exists. And therefore I think that many Universe Developers (if they have 
upload rights or not) are contributing back to Debian in their own preferable 
way. 
The problem is only: First, I don't know if the patch works as well on Debian, 
so I have to rely on the debian package maintainer, that he will test the 
patch and/or add-on that it works perfectly on Debian. If not, he has to 
decline the inclusion of the contributed work. Which is ok and for Debian 
better then to include a patch which doesn't work.

So, to be honest, there is already collaboration between these two parts of 
the Debian world, but, I know it, too, it can be improved. Which is the work 
we're (debian and ubuntu folks) trying to do here.

And as I wrote in the email to Raphael, I'm with you, and try to help where I 
can. 

But to be honest, with all this talks and flames and rants on d-d, there will 
be more problems these coming months then ever (see Joeys mail on d-d and as 
CC to ubuntu-motu ML, which I think is misleaded, he should have used 
ubuntu-devel ML, because some of his software is laying in the main archives)

Well, I just left Gentoo because of those reasons, because some people are 
thinking that they're better then others (the animal farm syndrome). This I 
can see as well in the work between our two worlds. And it's a pity, that 
this happens.
For me, the wish to be not involved in those trench warfares, is quite strong, 
so I have to think about retirement from the actual project I'm volunteering 
for, because without those people, who are ranting and flaming against 
something today, there wouldn't be this wonderful social and technical 
environment named Ubuntu.

Without solving those social issues between Debian and Ubuntu, I, for my 
person, can't stay. And thinking about the situation, that no one can solve 
those problems we have in the near future, I think it's quite fair towards 
the community to say "Good Bye, Ubuntu Development, I'm coming back when our 
"big brother" is growing up a bit more."

And Philipp, I'm no target  at all. :) So don't worry :)

Regards,

\sh
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