Wei Chen: > Jochen Schulz wrote: >> >> Theoretically: yes. But since backport.org's maintainers are Debian >> developers themselves (at least most of them, I think), compatibility to >> the official repositories is very good and there shouldn't be any >> problems apart from human mistakes. Exceptions are documented here: >> <http://backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faq>. > > So it is that based on Debian, people create Ubuntu. Also based on > Debian, there is Backports.
But while Ubuntu is a complete distribution, which is theoretically
independent from Debian, bpo is an add-on, specifically for users of
Debian stable. It is not meant to be a distribution, but merely a
service which lets you upgrade specific packages to their version in
testing while still running stable. You cannot install it or upgrade
your complete system to backports since it is not complete.
> These are all projects that improve desktop users' experience (from what
> I believe, at least). Is there anything that Debian itself does for this?
This sounds like a troll. :)
Bus as far as I can tell, there is only little concentrated effort to
improve "users' experience" throughout the distribution, that's true. In
Debian, (almost) no one can tell a package maintainer what to include in
a package or which patches to accept. Since (almost...) all work is done
voluntarily and unpaid, nobody can force anyone to do something.
> There are examples of successful projects. For the workload/manpower
> issue, I guess what is needed is a flag. The project is there; people
> think it is interesting; and then they may try to contribute to it. For
> example, those above mentioned projects also get enough contributors to
> work with them.
It appears to me that you are underestimating the size, success and
workforce of the Debian project. There are more than a thousand Debian
developers, maintaining about 30.000 packages (wild guess based on
tab-completion), most of them in more than one version.
Debian *is* the flag.
J.
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