Bruce Byfield wrote:
Check the debian-devel list over the last couple of months to see some
of the discussion on this subject. There are definitely concerns,
although how justified they are is uncertain.
I can understand "concerns". But I wouldn't want to suggest malice on
the part of Ubuntu. The simplest explanation is that:
* From Ubuntu's point of view, Ubuntu is trying to be an easy-to-use,
desktop-oriented distro. This means that they are interested in using
recent packages, and they are not interested in supporting 11
architectures. Since they have different goals than Debian itself, there
are likely to be at least some ammount of incompatibility.
* From Debian's point of view, there is a large and growing distro whose
packages do not go through the same QA process that ensures that it'll
run on all 11 architectures Debian supports.
I would guess that it's a simple case of two, perfectly well-meaning
groups of people having a (possibly major) disagreement because they're
looking at an issue from very different points of view. No need to
insert malice anywhere.
One difference is that Ubuntu is community-based like Debian, rather
than commercially-based like Linspire.
The reasoning is that Ubuntu wants to take over Debian's position as the
source of other distributions, and run things more efficiently than
Debian does.
Personally, I don't think there's enough evidence to say that Ubuntu
wants to takeover in this way, but a lot of people are speculating about
its future plans.
Speculation is bad.
In any event, I can't see Ubuntu replacing Debian. I say that because
they have a different focus. Debian has a broad focus. It tries to
include as many packages as possible and support as many architectures
as possible. Ubuntu has a narrow focus. It supports few packages in a
few architectures. By doing so, they can provide things that Debian has
a hard time providing. Hence, Ubuntu is based on a subset of Debian.
I *can* see Ubuntu becoming the basis of most Debian-on-desktop distros.
But that's different. I wouldn't think that's replacing Debian.
Cheers,
Daniel.
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