The Debian Democracy

Let me say right out front that Debian is pretty much my most-used distribution, and I have a great deal of respect for the project and those who work on it.

This article seems to be talking more about Ubuntu's lack of democracy than Debian's policies and procedures.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what Debian appears to be doing most of the time is letting the upstream projects do what they do in terms of features, user interface, etc., and letting innovation in terms of applications and UI happen upstream and appear in Debian in an organic way - meaning newer releases get newer features, and applications mostly appear in Debian in their default configuration.

I expect that Slackware is even more like this - with upstream packages appearing in the distribution pretty much as they are intended by the upstream developers.

Ubuntu seems to make more changes to the UI so those applications from upstream look/feel more "Ubuntu-ish." Whether they send these changes upstream or not, I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that many upstream projects have their own ideas about design and UI that don't always (or often) meet with the ideas coming out of Ubuntu.

Which approach is better? That's a very good question.

Quoting:Ubuntu seems to make more changes to the UI so those applications from upstream look/feel more "Ubuntu-ish." Whether they send these changes upstream or not, I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that many upstream projects have their own ideas about design and UI that don't always (or often) meet with the ideas coming out of Ubuntu.

Now I'm honestly confused.

Which one is upstream? Isn't Debian upstream from Ubuntu and Ubuntu is downstream from Debian?

Or do the terms "upstream" and "downstream" mean exactly the opposite of what I think they mean?

> Which approach is better? That's a very good question.

The vanilla packages approach of Slackware is a big reason I use it. Nothing against the Ubuntu developers, but most of the time the guys making the apps "Ubuntu-ish" know about 2% of what the original developers know about that package. I've found that I run into fewer WTF-type errors if I use the original rather than modified sources.

I consider "upstream" to be all the packages that go into a distribution that aren't created by that distribution itself. Things such as GNOME, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc., are upstream from the distributions themselves.

@ComputerBob:

{upstream} developers - Debian - Ubuntu {downstream}

The quote makes sense to me. The developers try to make a UI behave a certain way, and then Ubuntu goes and breaks it, in the name of Ubuntu uniformity.

I'm not saying the Ubuntu way is right or wrong. It's all open source, so anybody can modify the code.

I imagine that for Ubuntu, this is an easier way to get what they want then going upstream, and if upstream wants what Ubuntu does, they can certainly take it.

I suppose as long as the Ubuntu developers can keep rolling in their patches, this way of doing things can continue.

It's not so much forking the upstream projects as bending them to suit the distribution's goals.

In this case, users will decide if they like it.

Apart from users liking / disliking UI-changes, the more "patched" something is, the more difficult it will be to do bugfixing etc. So apart from 'right' or 'wrong', you could argue if it's a smart thing to do or not.

I guess when bugs happen, the quality of the patches will make or literally break the experience.

> ...the quality of the patches will make or literally break the experience.

Assuming there are any patches. How many times has Ubuntu closed a bug report with "will not fix"?

Quoting:How many times has Ubuntu closed a bug report with "will not fix"?

I have one open right now, so we'll see.

oh how dare you jd ... those werent bugs ... those were features.

Also, the next time a version comes down, the Ubuntu developers are going to have to go back and make those same changes again.

So Ubuntu, by making local changes, is giving themselves job security. Or, ever increasing workload.

I like Debian's voluntary process. Developers do what they do because they want to. Debian itself is organized in a "democratic" structure, but because individual developers cannot be coerced into doing anything, it is not "democracy".

51% cannot force 49% to comply.

Debian is cooperation, consensus, with written guidelines.