Mark Shuttleworth Talks About What Ubuntu Contributes

[Xake]

You cannot compare (current) contribution amount of Gentoo to Ubuntu.

I really hope you are a troll. Yes, they are somewhat unlike (Gentoo being pretty small, Ubuntu being pretty large. Gentoo has no employed developers, Ubuntu has. Gentoo does not file bugs in Red Hats bugzilla when filesystems fails, Ubuntu does), but they have one thing in common: both are distributions that do upstream code. Then how come there is this large difference in contribution that is not in Ubuntus favor? And why can you not compare them? Because that makes Canonical/Ubuntu look extreamly bad?

[crazycheese]

Then we've got Launchpad, whose open source code is so difficult to decipher and set up that most people give up and just use the official launchpad.net installation. I went from zero to having an FTPES server backed by an OpenLDAP directory server over SSL in about 12 hours. I set up a mail server with IMAP+SSL, SMTP, roundcubemail, and local mboxes in about 4 hours. I accomplished both of these tasks as a relative "newbie" to these environments. There were a ton of configuration files to edit, and a mind boggling array of settings and options. It was hell -- or so I thought, until I started playing with Launchpad.

I spent over 3 days trying to configure even a basic Launchpad service on my own box, and gave up without being the least bit successful. Canonical has an incentive to make Launchpad the open source project as sysadmin-unfriendly as possible, while making their own (monetized) Launchpad.net as user-friendly as possible. Are they intentionally making it difficult to install? Your guess is as good as mine.

Look what I found:
"Projects
..
Canonical staff are currently working on a number of open-source projects including:
..
Launchpad

Created for Ubuntu and now also used on Zope, Creative Commons and Silva CMS, ..
..It?s easy to use and takes minutes to set up."

http://www.canonical.com/about-canonical/canonical-and-open-source

They mean minutes, not days. Is it all marketing on the page srsly?

[crazycheese]

I really hope you are a troll. Yes, they are somewhat unlike (Gentoo being pretty small, Ubuntu being pretty large. Gentoo has no employed developers, Ubuntu has. Gentoo does not file bugs in Red Hats bugzilla when filesystems fails, Ubuntu does), but they have one thing in common: both are distributions that do upstream code. Then how come there is this large difference in contribution that is not in Ubuntus favor? And why can you not compare them? Because that makes Canonical/Ubuntu look extreamly bad?

Huh? Gentoo is small? Wow! You ever heard about what ebuild is and how bug tracker works? Gentoo upstreams all changes to source instantly. It fires bugs to upstream, individally. Its is not behind some company, same as Debian. So its not trackable as one big bunch, as RedHat, Novell etc. Its input is hidden behind individuals and various companies.

Ubuntu?
Look at this thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsjMbWXIcoA

And at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw

It starts from 23:00

At 23:00, Armateurs and Individuals is for BIG part Debian/Gentoo.

Cmmon show me what Ubuntu has improved compared to Gentoo. Or keep the troll title.

[crazycheese]

In the case, you miss, this is also very interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SAghl3ohR4

[Kjella]

I'll just say that I pick my distro based on which makes my life easier, not what makes upstream's life easier. The whole upstream sharing is supposed to work by mutual benefit, not because you're compelled to.

When it comes to things that aren't plain bugs and can't be directly benchmarked - which is most of the UI/installer - then Ubuntu simply experiments, it doesn't argue with upstream which often have their own ideas of what good design is. And if the users prefer the Ubuntu solution - which they have a pretty good track record for - then it's upstream's problem, not Ubuntu's.

True in some ways Ubuntu does just prep, polish and wax the car rather than work much on the internals. There's not much to contribute upstream of it, but as long as most the other Linux companies suck at it I'll stay with Ubuntu. My 0.02$.

[Xake]

Huh? Gentoo is small?

Yeah? If you count the userbase and the numbers of devs, then compared to Canonical/Ubuntu. Yeah.

Cmmon show me what Ubuntu has improved compared to Gentoo. Or keep the troll title.

I think you misunderstood me. IIRC Gentoo had contributed more to the kernel last time I heard then Canonical/Ubuntu, the same for the X-server. And the same was not counting the "invdividuals".

Gentoo even without employed developers and a small number of devs hits higher in the code ranking then Canonical/Ubuntu.

[Xake]

True in some ways Ubuntu does just prep, polish and wax the car rather than work much on the internals. There's not much to contribute upstream of it, but as long as most the other Linux companies suck at it I'll stay with Ubuntu. My 0.02$.

Yeah, well if they did work on the internals they may not have had to force all their users and customers to regenerate their ssh keys and so on because of a patch from Debian upstream never approved of?
I rather follow that track record then the "oh, tingly shiny" record.

[BlackStar]

Yeah, well if they did work on the internals they may not have had to force all their users and customers to regenerate their ssh keys and so on because of a patch from Debian upstream never approved of?
I rather follow that track record then the "oh, tingly shiny" record.

Wait, what? Are you saying that if Ubuntu had more active developers then Debian wouldn't have commited broken code?

How does that work exactly?

[Xake]

Wait, what? Are you saying that if Ubuntu had more active developers then Debian wouldn't have commited broken code?

How does that work exactly?

It works like if Canonical/Ubuntu were serious they would had actually review the changes Debian did and not just merge them. At least for the core packages or security-packages (like openssl) I think you should ask for more, and not just blame Debian for stupidness that was exported to Ubuntu.

At least for Gentoo if you try to persuade them to use Debian patches they often refuse to. Much because they often do not trust the patches, or think they make irrelevant changes that should be upstreamed first. I do not know why this seems to have become somewhat of a silent policy but I can assure you that for some reason it was there long before the openssl bug.

[mugginz]

You'd think Canonical must have unlimited resources going by the way some people talk.