On 6/11/07, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale / gmail.com> wrote: > On 6/11/07, Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com> wrote: > > > Ubuntu is a Debian *fork*. > > More true in theory than in practice. There was a lot more noise > about the fear that Ubuntu would be a fork back in 2005 when Debian > users were getting tired of waiting for Sarge and Ubuntu started to > appear on the horizon. > > But the truth is, at least, more nuanced. And even guys like Ian > Murdoch pointed that out at the time: > > http://ianmurdock.com/?p=167 > > And for a view from the Ubuntu "camp" at that time: > http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html > > Ubuntu takes packages from sid, stabilizes them before debian, but > feeds whatever changes they make back to the sid stream. > > So it provides a stream of debian derived releases but instead of > using the traditional Debian model of "we'll ship the next stable > version when it's ready," Ubuntu has a time-box ship model. Ubuntu > makes the final decision on what's going to actually make the next > release based on which packages have achieved stability in time to > make it, instead of waiting until all of the packages which were > picked at the time the release was started get there. One way of > looking at this is that Debian has a more waterfall release cycle > while Ubuntu is managed using more of the agile project management > approach. Back when Ubuntu "Badger" was in the throes of being > released, Debian Woody was several years old, and Sarge looked to be > slipping almost faster than the release date was approaching, > something which Murdock alludes to in the post I quoted. > > The tension is/was? between the needs of server administrators who > favor a stable platform with security maintainence, and developers who > want more recent versions of the upstream code. Back then Ubuntu was > better for the latter. Then they introduced 'long term support' > releases which are specific Ubuntu releases which will have committed > support for five years (or there abouts). This helps the server > users, since the downside of Debian's support policy is that they only > provided maintenance for an older stable release for a limited time > after a new stable release becomes available. The net is that Ubuntu > provides both newer code in the latest release for those who want it, > and more predictable support of older releases for those who need > stability. > > > It has less in common with Debian itself than > > PC-BSD and DesktopBSD have in common with FreeBSD, and may even have less > > in common with Debian than Dragonfly BSD has with FreeBSD. > > I don't know enough about those distributions to make the comparison, > but from my experience, Ubuntu doesn't feel like a fork. Even if > Debian doesn't take ALL of ubuntu's packages as time goes on, I > predict that the bulk of the code will remain compatible. > > That all said, while I'm a happy Ubuntu user, I don't use packaged > versions of some specific software, most notably Ruby. This isn't > because of Ubuntu but because of Debian. In the case of Ruby one > major reason is because, as far as I know unless it's changed > recently, Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) doesn't really support gems. > Now this may have changed recently, but I've been happy installing > Ruby and Gems from source, and gems as gems. > > -- > Rick DeNatale > > My blog on Ruby > http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ > > Last time I looked at it there was some weird philosophy for not having gems support in apt. If I remember correctly it was because gem uses a folder per package type deal and that goes against the grain of apt. I can't find where I read this, so you'd need to do lots of googling to find it. -- -fREW