The Grumpy Groundhog - Ubuntu for Developers

**loki969** writes "Ubuntu is planing a "cutting edge"-distro, 'The Grumpy Groundhog', which will be aimed explicitly at developers. Here is a quote from their site: 'Upstream development in the open source world moves at a tremendous pace. Many developers like to keep up to date with specific upstream products, but the work involved in building from CVS every day is substantial. With The Grumpy Groundhog Project, Ubuntu provides those developers with a ready source of packages containing the latest upstream code. '"

Comments

Unstable, experimental, Ubuntu...?

[KiloByte]

Uh oh. If Hoary is a rough equivalent of Debian Experimental, then the developer-only Grumpy is...?

Re:Unstable, experimental, Ubuntu...?

[KiloByte]

Yes, it's based on Unstable -- but with a lot of unofficial packages being thrown in. I personally learnt to trust random repositories as much as I trust rabid dogs. If it's anything more than a single package without any dependencies (like micq), the interoperability with other packages is usually shot. This applies to some degree even to Christian Marillat's packages, one of the best repositories.

Debian developers are extremely cautious. They don't usually package a given piece of software until months after it's declared stable by the upstream. This makes them picked on by the rest of Linux world for "outdated, ancient software", but thanks to their policies I can run Debian Testing on production servers, with the only thing borked being ISDN support (which doesn't work in Stable at all).

Re:Unstable, experimental, Ubuntu...?

[xenocide2]

Ubuntu may be based on unstable, but they add packages that are just now making it into Experimental, which is basically only used for GNOME & KDE, new gcc versions and other widely used products. Personally, I think that the experimental distribution should be eliminated, as this is what unstable is for. If that doesn't sit well with you, then I can only suggest using testing and enforcing the existing rules on entering testing.

No other distro I know of is using 2.6.10 by default, and 2.6.11 apparently isn't fixing broken things like laptop touchpads. I know that I'm personally having a problem with rebooting that I can only attribute to the kernel (nothing else should have the prividges to mess with data persistant across reboots, and Warty worked fine). Soft rebooting fails, but a powerdown and pressing the power button back on will work as normal. It's a bit annoying, but I can see the justifcation behind calling Ubuntu for what it is.

Really what I'd like is something closer to sid with Ubuntu's pragmatic approch to packaging non-free software. I'm not a big fan of huge six month updates, and there's about three packages in sid right now that I'd like to get ahold of. But it's not wise to mix the two, however possible it may be. Maybe this Grumpy guy is what I'm after!

Re:Unstable, experimental, Ubuntu...?

[xenocide2]

How does a "mostly usable system that automated systems can feed into testing" help development? I recall some time ago that Debian held unstable hostage until a new stable was released, because developers were simply ignoring RC bugs. Unstable should not be considered a mostly stable system.

Really radical stuff should be tested before its even uploaded to experimental. Seriously, I think developers should be running testing. Every developer running unstable should be considered a vote to drop support for a stable branch. Experimental is a hack that recognizes a severe schism within Debian that has yet to be resolved.

Re:Unstable, experimental, Ubuntu...?

[petermgreen]

unstable is where most contibutions are uploaded so it seems perfectly natural for developers to run the system they are compiling and uploading packages to

testing was and will be (its not right now because debian is in final release freeze) the place where the next stable release is built up. Unless pacakges had problems then prior to the recent freeze they should have made it from unstable to testing in less than two weeks. Hardly an eternity.

i'm not sure what you mean by holding unstable hostage? sure in the run up to a release more care is needed with stuff that could affect propogations into a partially and later fully frozen testing (mainly stuff like shared libs and key system components) but i don't see anything wrong with that.

sure devs can test stuff before uploading to expermental but with something as core system as X or APT you can get a really fucked up system if something goes badly wrong with the program so an extra level of checking is needed.

Re:Forking A, man

[zbik]

If I want to improve the man page for sort, I don't need to create a new distro, I can just contribute my diffs and have a positive impact on one of the existing distros.

Maybe your patch would have a positive impact; maybe not. Maybe it would break something completely. The only way to tell is lengthy testing and QA. Some people won't want to use your patch until all the dust has settled, while others will want to try it out right away. Grumpy Groundhog is for the second group.

Forks are not always bad when you have two sets of users with totally different needs.

Re:Ubuntu continues to grow...

[**loki969**]

i think you are right about the growth of ubuntu. it really is a fine distro. but i don't think, that this will kill of any other distros. and in my book, having less choices, isn't a good thing either!