Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters(discourse.ubuntu.com) |
Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters(discourse.ubuntu.com) |
Hopefully this won't in any way adversely affect development and maintenance of packages for Debian.
Nobody wants embrace-extend-extinguish, nor poaching of volunteers, nor Debian starting to get second-hand packaging that goes to Ubuntu first, etc., even accidentally.
> The Debcrafters must spend the majority of their work time on Ubuntu, but they will be encouraged to spend a day per week contributing to other distributions to gain understanding, and bring fresh perspectives to Ubuntu (and the reverse, hopefully!). This will be structured as a literal day per week, agreed with the team management - for example “I work on NixOS on Tuesdays”.
That's a good open source company practice. And takes some of the edge off of Ubuntu getting so much mileage out of Debian effort, but making the brand all their commercial one.
I'll still continue to be all about Debian Stable, since it's actually been better for production use than Ubuntu has been for me.
Early versions of debcraft will focus on compatibility with the existing format, and aim to help unify workflow across our Ubuntu Developer community.
A notorious number of maintaining teams are the same for both distros and there hasn't been a problem I could think of.
> And takes some of the edge off of Ubuntu getting so much mileage out of Debian effort
And if you look on those teams' Debian QA pages you'll see that Sid isn't the upstream, this "mileage" has worked both ways for many years, for example Plasma 5 and 6 updates started in Unstable after they were deployed and ate most of the bugs in Ubuntu.
> I'll still continue to be all about Debian Stable
Which is the reason you probably don't know about the above since all of that work is to get updates into Testing.
The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like Debian, Arch Linux, NixOS and others are encouraged to join the team, and will even get paid to contribute one day per week to those projects to foster learning and idea sharing
What are the requirements for joining? Will I be asked about my high-school grades? Pass a psychometric test?
Thanks.
I'm currently having an issue with Firefox where it will not stop crashing all of the time, even whilst using Hackernews. Not a RAM or CPU issue, just buggy software pushed through a "move fast and break things" attitude.
We have two channels for distributing software in Ubuntu: the archive and the snap store. Each are suited to different scenarios.
Irrespective of any view on Snap as a packaging format, the workflow and developer experience is, in my opinion, much simpler to work with. The barrier to contribution is much lower.
The work on debcraft is to try and bring some of the lessons we've learned there to those developers working with debs - while also introducing new primitives that will allow for extended integration testing of the distribution using some of our existing (well tested) machinery.
> In the coming weeks our Starcraft team (responsible for Snapcraft, Rockcraft 1, Charmcraft) will begin prototyping debcraft, which will (in time) become the de facto method for creating, testing and uploading packages to the Ubuntu archive.
Is it the same debcraft as the Debian one? https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debcraft
Canonical’s debcraft will be a close relation of snapcraft, rockcraft and charmcraft, built using the craft-application and associated libraries.
Unfortunate? Ubuntu developers surely know what exists in Debian already, especially since both of them share the same packaging format (at least originally). They must have realized where the "deb" part of the name comes from, no?
Do they play Starcraft?
Or is it a "star" team that works on their "craft" solutions?
Debian branding is an important signal of quality. Ubuntu has always seemed like a lower quality product.
If a package is abandoned (i.e. there is no current maintainer), how is it determined if a package should be updated and maintained by Debcrafters or someone else?
Is there any kind of download metrics to know if a package is used?
How would package maintenance be prioritized?
If the package is in Ubuntu Main repository (https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-updates-releases-and-reposito...), it is maintained by Canonical engineers for LTS. Ubuntu Universe gets security fixes for up to 10 years as part of the Ubuntu Pro offering, which is where most of the upstream Debian packages are.
A package from Ubuntu can be removed using the following process, Anyone can file a request. https://canonical-ubuntu-project.readthedocs-hosted.com/stag... (note: the url will move to documentation.ubuntu.com domain)
Debian also has https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=openssl, but it does not mean that a package with very low popularity should be removed.
Congratulations on making it through that crazy, unscientific process.
I remember being vocal about it being a bad solution to a problem nobody had while I was working for Canonical. That's probably one of the reasons it seems unlikely they'll ever hire me again.