I’ve been quite happy with my Debian setups, but I’ve found myself lusting after some of the concepts in Foresight (Conary), NixOS, ZeroInstall etc.

$ apt-show-versions | grep experimental | wc -l
429

It’s the KDE 4.3RC effect. ;-)

Furthermore, experimental is not a distribution, it’s only an additional repository. What I meant was more (in the Ubuntu style):

Alice and her friends want to work on multiarch. They create an unstable-multiarch branch were they implement it and can see what it breaks in the distribution.

Frank and his friends want to work on KMS and create and unstable-kms branch.

Frank’s branch and Alice’s one are distinct so the work of each team does not bother the other (and users can participate using the branched distributions).

If a Debian developer breaks something in unstable, this can make their fellow developers unproductive and slow down the whole project.

Debian has an “experimental” repository which is similar to what you describe, but it is rarely utilized, often misunderstood and has some technical shortcomings.

One big strength of Debian, IMHO, is the rolling release aspect of Sid. I’ve been using Sid for nearly ten year with only one major glitch (as far as I can remember).

The “resistance to change” you describe and the careful, painful (for DD) and long transitions are what make Unstable so… stable.

At the opposite, development version of Ubuntu (that I test regularly) is often broken. It’s not a critic per se, it’s what permits big changes.

The idea of distribution branches (no ig, Unstable, Testing and Stable are not branches in the sense of source branches) is very interesting.

It would be cool if developers could make a branch of Unstable to test new features. A bit like Ubuntu’s PPA but at the distribution level. This would lead to a “broken branch” were fix could be done before new feature would merge back to unstable.

The problem is that it would ask time and effort from developers and, more important I think, infrastructure for the Debian project.

Yannick

I don’t know who these supposed Debian devs are (ie, whether they’re really Ubuntu devs who consider themselves also debian devs simply because they’re at DebConf, or whether they’re officially maintaining any debian packages), nor what percentage of the debian dev community they comprise. Yes, I do know that there are a number of debian devs who would like to see some things change/improve in debian’s infrastructure (but mostly in regards to faster approval for new dev assignments, less personal flame wars on the mailing list, or other such “social” things. I haven’t heard many clamoring for adding additional “branches” to debian’s existing 3 official branches. I’m sure there are some folks doing that, but not enough to warrant consideration of the dangerously counterproductive suggestions you’ve made).

But here’s the bottom line: Debian’s infrastructure is _already much better_ than Ubuntu’s. The former produces more software, more upstream support, more kernel contributions, a distro with much wider platform support, a more stable, faster performing distro, a more customizable distro, a distro that is more trusted and utilized in businesses, etc. It’s also a community that is much more transparent (to the point that it can’t stifle dissenting viewpoints even if the “big cheese” wanted to). Contrast that with, as just one example, Ubuntu devs censorship of objections to Canonical’s self-serving, hypocritical commercial use of the Ubuntu name in its commercial Ubuntu One service. There is no accountability nor transparency in the Ubuntu community. There are only people who have the power to stifle opposing viewpoints, and do so.

You need to stop talking about what Debian’s community and infrastructure should be doing, because it’s _already_ way better than Ubuntu’s alternative, and instead spend your time fixing all of the much-worse-problems with Ubuntu’s development and community.

And that’s the bottom line.

“attribute your comments to some meaningful identity, such as your real name”

Why, so you can change the subject to talking about me instead of the merits (or rather, lack of merits) of what you say about Debian in your blogs?

That’s the sort of stuff I’ve come to expect from the Ubuntu community. Typical.

If you’re “at a disadvantage”, why don’t you just employ the usual Ubuntu way of handling that — just censor my reply, pretend that the Ubuntu way is still the best, and continue to dole out “helpful” advice about how the other distro communities can learn something from Ubuntu (as if they should be using it as something other than an example of how _not_ to be as useful a distro to the Linux community as Debian is).

day to day we see colaboration happen and that’s the ways it should be. we need more of that perhaps but let us keep on working on behalf of what these project stand for.

There will always be naysayers and what not but it is up to us to keep the work going regardless of all the adversities.