• How to properly maintain our packages in Ubuntu

    From Dima Kogan@21:1/5 to All on Tue Apr 23 02:10:01 2024
    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

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