How to properly maintain our packages in Ubuntu
Hi.
This is more a question about Ubuntu's policies, but since most of us
Debian developers are also indirectly Ubuntu developers, and since this
touches on the high-level relationship between Debian and Ubuntu, this
is an approriate forum, I think.
Alright. It is April 2024, so Ubuntu 24.04 is coming out. My hazy
understanding of what happens is that on some day (when?) they snapshot
Debian/unstable, apply their patches, rebuild everything, and ship it.
This is probably over-simplified, but mostly right, yes?
What happens if a package cannot be rebuilt? I think it just silently
doesn't make it into the Ubuntu release? Case in point. I'm upstream for
several projects (mrcal, for instance) that use a simple build system
(mrbuild). These are both packages in Debian. Due to an uninteresting
change to an unrelated package (python3-numpy), mrcal started to FTBFS
at some point, and I fixed it within a day of our bug report by updating
mrbuild: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1067398
But this mrbuild update came too late to make it into Ubuntu 24.04, and
thus mrcal cannot be built there and thus there is no mrcal in 24.04. At
least I think that's what's going on? I don't see any bugs on the Ubuntu
launchpad, and I have no idea when the cutoff happened. Has it happened?
So... How are we supposed to be taking care of "our" Ubuntu packages? Is
there some Ubuntu mailing list where I should post to ask for more
clarity in their processes?
Thanks
Please cc me in the replies; I'm not subscribed and list
(un)subscription currently doesn't work.
Reply to: