On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 03:31:26PM -0400, M. Zhou wrote:
Hi all,
Thank you for stepping up for this important and challenging role!
I noticed that a half of the nominees mentioned strengthening the collaboration between Debian/Ubuntu. Would you mind expand a little
bit on this, like the rough idea? In particular:
* What problem needs to be addressed regarding Debian/Ubuntu collabration?
* Rough idea on how the identified issue can be addressed?
Generally I find the DDPO page's Ubuntu column quite helpful.
Sometimes I can see Ubuntu has some patches, but not forwarded
to Debian. Some of these changes can indeed be merged into Debian,
and I did this multiple times.
* What is the goal of the proposed collaboration improvement?
For example, what will be introduced on top of my current experience
in this regard.
Long answers are not necessary. I just want to understand the brief motivation and goals.
I'm afraid that this is both a longer email than you anticipated,
and also somewhat perhaps different answers than what you were
interested perhaps, because I think for me it's less a concrete issue
in the collaboration space.
But I don't want to leave you without an answer to your concrete
question, so having thought about this some way, I have some notes
and ideas on how we collaborate and how we can collaborate better.
We sure have a lot of spaces where collaboration works great, like the Canonical desktop team is very engaged in Debian GNOME maintenance too,
Paride has become very actively involved in upstream autopkgtest
maintenance, and of course most of the APT work happens upstream
first; and sure the patch board is useful.
But we also have situations like the time_t transition that in the
end caused some grieve with no clear way to communicate those
grievances; or people are unhappy with changes performed to their
package downstream but don't find anyone to contact.
We can sort of improve both by improving communication. Say you want
to try something new and would like Ubuntu to try it first, who do
you reach out too? Say you notice that your packages get mangled in
wrong ways downstream by various people, who do you talk to?
In Ubuntu, rbasak started an initiative called SRU Reps that has
teams designate representatives to the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates
team to provide a channel for feedback on patterns of behavior.
In a sort of sense, it may be worthwhile for Ubuntu to provide
representatives in Debian for Debian developers to reach out to,
and vice versa, it could make sense for Debian to have designated representatives in the Ubuntu community.
# concerns re increasing community divergence
But what I mentioned in my platform as a problem is less of a collaborative
one but rather that in some ways, Ubuntu community sometimes feels like
it grows healthier, and I wonder how we can convert Ubuntu members into
Debian members too.
I think there's challenges for Ubuntu people to contribute to Debian,
and it will increasingly become so because we're diverging further and
further, and there will be more people who (can) contribute to Ubuntu
but can't/won't contribute to Debian.
Ubuntu has almost-universal git access to all source packages now, a contributor can for most part just `git ubuntu clone` a repository,
make some changes and then submit a merge request. Done. People are
sort of expected to make do with a merge request like that even if
they prefer a different workflow; like a debdiff in the BTS is in
Debian.
Ubuntu has a web-based way to report bugs, a discourse forum for
discussions and recently moved from IRC to Matrix, all of which
create a significantly lower burden of entry.
I don't have good answers here, I'm not sure I have any answers
really, and a lot of this is highly complex both on the technical
as well as social level, as the whole discussion on mail line
length limits shows.
While we talk about line length limits, I literally had people give
up trying to interact because they never used a mailing list before
and are too scared of doing something wrong.
--
debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
ubuntu core developer i speak de, en
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