Suggestion: Merge with debian systems

[J V]

Ubuntu is a great distro... It has great development tools, great community, and is generally great...

When Shuttleworth started U , with completely separate bug databases, suggestions, forums (although the ubuntu forums are quite a lot faster than debian's and that probably won't change) lots of work is being done over again.

The whole point of open source is that we can build off eachother rather than double up the work on "hidden" code, but by having these separate systems for operating systems that are 95% the same, we're still being inefficient (lots of work done over and over again)

I'm not looking for a flame war, I'm saying ubuntu AND debian would greatly benefit from a merge of systems... even a weak merge (a bot automatically posts on launchpad what someone posts on debian bug tracker and vice versa) would save both debian and ubuntu a ******** of work we shouldn't have to be doing in the first place...

Has anyone considered this? Why are we still slowing down progress (and leaching off debian hehe)?

[Methuselah]

Ubuntu does 'build off debian'.
But while bugs in Debian unstable might be Ubuntu bugs it is not necessarily true that Ubuntu bugs will be in Debian since Ubuntu adds packages and reconfigures things.
I doubt the Debian developers would appreciate wading through Ubuntu bugs in a unified bug system.
Since Ubuntu is based off the cutting edge Debian I'd say that the way Ubuntu exposes these packages to many users really helps sure-up the eventual stable Debian release.

But I'm sure if you asked the Debian community whether they favoured some type of merge the answer would be a resounding NO!
While the two distros have similar needs their goals are not exactly the same at all.

[J V]

Oh I'm aware of that, you shouldn't make them the same project, but I'm sure there are lots of lower level bugs that could be tagged cross-affecting, theres bound to be a lot of step-retracing...

[Sef]

Moved to community cafe

[blueturtl]

Filing bugs does help even "unrelated" or untangled projects. Consider that bugs filed against Ubuntu can also help Debian because we share many of the major components. If you file a bug against Gnome, all projects that use Gnome benefit. Also bugs filed against Debian might end up helping Ubuntu users.

When stuff goes upstream, it always trickles down to the many many projects that are on the path downstream.

In that sense, filing the same bug over in many projects (for the same thing) might only create unnecessary overhead. Or am I misunderstanding your proposition?