Hi Dima,As a Debian Developer myself, I understand your concerns. Processes in this respect could be slightly better, but it also comes down to the differences between the two distributions. More detailed responses inline.
On 5/2/24 10:56 AM, Dima Kogan wrote:
Hello. I'm a Debian developer, and contribute to Ubuntu only indirectly: by my contributions to Debian being automatically pulled into Ubuntu. But since Ubuntu has more users than Debian, most of MY users use the Ubuntu packages. So I'd like to talk about improving the links between the two projects. In particular:
Ubuntu and Debian package maintenance responsibilities are slightly different; in Ubuntu, members of the Core Developers team are collectively responsible for the packages in the Main and Restricted components, and Masters of the Universe are collectively responsible for packages in the Universe and Multiverse. The ratio of "maintainers holding responsibility":"packages to be maintained" is much lower in Ubuntu than it is in Debian.
Once a package has landed in the Ubuntu archive, Ubuntu Developers now collectively hold responsibility for that package. We ease much of this work by autosyncing packages without deltas to Ubuntu in the first half of each cycle; that being said, we sometimes drive major transitions in Ubuntu before Debian, to align with our release cycle.
Many Ubuntu Developers (myself included) are trained to give as much back to Debian as we possibly can. If we fix a package that both exists in Debian and has the same bug, we are encouraged to send that fix upstream to the Debian bug tracker (or upstream itself, or both) to ensure less friction when we have to merge new changes from Debian. Some teams within Ubuntu do not follow this process at all, but I would consider them the exception rather than the rule.
The Debian maintainers of a package are not responsible for how their packages are used in Ubuntu, that's Ubuntu's responsibility. That being said, it is best practice to collaborate as much as we reasonably can, with the time we are given.
1. Debian and Ubuntu both have separate bug trackers. But for most
Ubuntu packages, there's no "Ubuntu" maintainer: there's just the
indirect one from Debian. In this case (which is most packages), it's
unhelpful for the Ubuntu bug tracker to exist as a separate thing. If
it must exist as a separate thing, those bugs should be forwarded
automatically to the Debian bug tracker. And updates (including
status updates) should be ingested back into the Ubuntu tracker. For
my packages I do try to manually look at the Ubuntu bug reports, but
I have no rights to close those bugs on launchpad. Probably I can
sign up somewhere, but as the DEBIAN developer, I shouldn't need to
do that.
I disagree with this approach. Ubuntu and Debian are not ABI-compatible; Ubuntu has a slightly different toolchain than Debian, and there are core differences in e.g. dpkg. Not all Ubuntu bugs are Debian bugs, not all Ubuntu teams want their bugs sent up to Debian, and many Debian Maintainers don't care about Ubuntu. This is a reality of maintaining separate distributions.
In some common cases, yes this seems reasonable, we should forward bugs to Debian. That being said, the first step is making sure the bug actually exists in the Debian-built version of the package, which is not always the case.
Generally, I do think we can be better about triaging our bugs and sending what we can up to Debian. That being said, I disagree with the solution of completely automating it.
2. As I just discovered, when Ubuntu rebuilds the archive for a release,
packages that FTBFS are silently dropped. There's no bug report on
either of the two bug trackers. I'm upstream for a project that has
been excluded from 24.04 because of this gap in the process. There
really should be a bug report filed, so that the problem can be fixed
before the release (what Debian does for their releases). And this
should be filed on the Debian bug tracker, if that's where the
maintenance happens.
This entirely falls on the Ubuntu Archive Administrators. To my understanding as an Ubuntu Developer, if we want a package removed, it is best practice to either have a Debian removal bug or an Ubuntu removal bug explaining the rationale. Whether this is enforced is up to the Archive Administrator doing the removal, since the only known public documentation says nothing about filing bugs:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArchiveAdministration#RemovalsTo say that packages that FTBFS are indiscriminately removed during transitions ignores the fact that usually, we do have to file a bug if we want an AA to remove a package.
I don't know how hard the above is, but the current situation isn't great for either of us. Related question: is there any way to get my packages included into some sort of noble "updates", or something like that? I'm looking at the "mrcal" source package that had an ininteresting FTBFS bug due to some dependency changing its interface. There was a Debian bug report filed and quickly fixed, but this happened too late for noble: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1067398 The fix is to update the "mrbuild" package to at least 1.9. Is it possible to get an updated "mrbuild" and "mrcal" into 24.04? If I'm misinterpreting what's going on, please let me know. Right now I see this: dima@shorty:~$ rmadison -u ubuntu mrbuild | grep noble mrbuild | 1.8-1 | noble/universe | source, all dima@shorty:~$ rmadison -u ubuntu libmrcal-dev | grep noble libmrcal-dev | 2.4.1-1build1 | noble-proposed/universe | arm64, ppc64el, riscv64 The latest mrcal IS 2.4.1, but here it's in "noble-proposed" and not for amd64 for some reason.
I would highly suggest filing a bug against the package in Launchpad following the Stable Release Update procedure:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#ProcedureIf you can articulate your case and the rationale for the update well, it is unlikely that it will be rejected.
Best regards, -- Simon Quigley si...@tsimonq2.net @tsimonq2:ubuntu.com on Matrix tsimonq2 on LiberaChat and OFTC 5C7A BEA2 0F86 3045 9CC8 C8B5 E27F 2CF8 458C 2FA4
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