On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 03:29:15PM +1300, Jim Cheetham wrote:Even if you know *exactly* what you are doing, do not reference a Debian repository on an Ubuntu machine.
um, why?
At one level, because that is the official position of the Ubuntu team :-)
if they are not identical, they will have a different version.
Not guaranteed by Ubuntu. While they do add an ubuntu suffix to software that they have independantly patched, they do not add a suffix where the compilation options (and build environment) were different.
warty and hoary are just different collections of debian packages, just as woody, sarge and sid are. all of those are in a different state of flux, and normaly you should not mix them.
All the packages in ubuntu/*/main are recompiled, and are not Debian project packages (although they are .deb files)
Basically, Ubuntu officially claim that they *can* issue a package with an identical name to a Debian package, but one that differs. They are not interested in supporting a setup with mixed repositories.
If you're good at pinning, then you're on your own, and you'll probably
be fine 99% of the time, and also be able to deal with a conflict should it arise. But for a "standard" user, who is the target of Ubuntu (and not Debian) then the default statement is "Do not use Debian repositories".
Also, because of these changes, and because of the versions of packages that are selected, and the amount of love and attention that Ubuntu provides, it is no longer really fair to say "Ubuntu is a Debian distribution". It's not. Ubuntu is a distribution that tracks the versions used in Debian, and it submits patchs back into Debian, but there is no automatic acceptance of these. Over time, the two distros will diverge quite significantly.
However, Ubuntu *is* a .deb and apt based distro, like Debian. So that's nice :-)
-jim
