Ya most packages are from Debian Sid. Pretty much the entire Universe and Multiverse is pulled almost straight from Debian Sid.
But that doesn't matter. There are a lot of tools, games, and packages that are floating around that are not packaged by any distribution.
One examples is the Ogre3D python bindings. Ogre is a very nice gaming engine that is developed on Linux, but actually is more popular on Windows. The python bindings allow you to do fast 3D graphics and games written python, but are executed on the effective C++ engine.
There are all sorts of extras that go along with that such as special versions of Ogre physics packages and whatnot that are extra.
So sure the Ogre3D engine and some stuff is included in most distributions right now, but not all the extras and not the python bindings. Depending on what version your dealing with it may not even be able to use the distribution-provided Ogre development files to bind to.. so that means building everything from scratch.
Trying to do that on your own requires a LOT of RAM and probably 4-5 hours of work. I tried it a few times and never got it to work 100%.
Nowadays there are third party packages made for Ubuntu that provide a lot of stuff, but they are not going to be accessable to most people unless they go through the effort of getting them added to the default repositories.
So any effort to help package this stuff and getting it working is going to be worth it.
Plus Ubuntu works with Debian on some stuff so once stuff gets packaged in Ubuntu it'll eventually make it back to Debian.
But that doesn't matter. There are a lot of tools, games, and packages that are floating around that are not packaged by any distribution.
One examples is the Ogre3D python bindings. Ogre is a very nice gaming engine that is developed on Linux, but actually is more popular on Windows. The python bindings allow you to do fast 3D graphics and games written python, but are executed on the effective C++ engine.
There are all sorts of extras that go along with that such as special versions of Ogre physics packages and whatnot that are extra.
So sure the Ogre3D engine and some stuff is included in most distributions right now, but not all the extras and not the python bindings. Depending on what version your dealing with it may not even be able to use the distribution-provided Ogre development files to bind to.. so that means building everything from scratch.
Trying to do that on your own requires a LOT of RAM and probably 4-5 hours of work. I tried it a few times and never got it to work 100%.
Nowadays there are third party packages made for Ubuntu that provide a lot of stuff, but they are not going to be accessable to most people unless they go through the effort of getting them added to the default repositories.
So any effort to help package this stuff and getting it working is going to be worth it.
Plus Ubuntu works with Debian on some stuff so once stuff gets packaged in Ubuntu it'll eventually make it back to Debian.
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