Really OT: Shuttleworth tries to deal with Debian

[gilpel at altern.org]

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article. Excerpt.


'Shuttleworth means that if all the Linux distributions would try to
co-ordinate their distribution release dates it would make life much
easier for upstream developers to support multiple Linux distributions.

Today, if I'm an upstream developer, say the Mozilla Foundation with
Firefox, I have to work hard to make sure my application will work with
multiple Linux distributions since each has slightly different components.
As an end-user, you don't see this. But, for an ISV (independent software
vendor), this has always been a real problem. Mozilla has the programmer
resources to handle the problem, many smaller ISVs don't have that luxury.
But, large or small, whether an upstream developer is big as Google or
just a guy with one, small useful program, the more work they have to put
in to supporting multiple Linux distributions the less they like it.

So, Shuttleworth wrote a long post to the Debian Project list on the
virtues of cadence. After laying out the problem I describe above, he
wrote, "I hear this story all the time from upstreams. "We'd like to help
distributions, but WHICH distribution should we pick?" That's a very
difficult proposition for upstreams. They want to help, but they can't.
And they shouldn't have to pick favorites."

Therefore, Shuttleworth argues, "Adopting a broad pattern of cadence and
collaboration between many distributions won't be a silver bullet for ALL
of those problems, but it will go a very long way to simplifying the life
of both upstreams and distribution maintainers. If upstream knows, for
example, that MANY distributions will be shipping a particular version of
their code and supporting it for several years then they are more likely
to be able to justify doing point releases with security fixes for that
version... which in turn makes it easier for the security teams and
maintainers in the distribution." '

http://blogs.computerworld.com/14499/shuttleworth_wants_debian_ubuntu_co_operation

That's how I began to believe in Red Hat :)