Written by Ubuwu the 26 Sep 08 at 17:46.
Category: System.
Related project:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
Rationale
At the beginning of each release cycle, the improvements other major distributions have made in their last release should be reviewed by the Ubuntu developers for their suitability to be integrated with Ubuntu. Many distributions have detailed lists available of all new features:
This way we will get some new features for free and will avoid reinventing the wheel on other problems. Also it can be an inspiration to come up with even better solutions.
Glotz, informally probably yes, well known features are looked at. But I don't think anyone actually has a thorough look at these lists so far, they include a lot of low profile ideas and features too. To give one example: mandriva switched from bzip2 to gzip compression for the manpages, both saving space and reducing decompression time. I don't know what compression Ubuntu uses for the manpages but if it is bzip2 too this could be a fairly easy to achieve improvement.
- I would be very surprised if Ubuntu developers weren't looking at other prominent distributions, reviewing them thoroughly, and accessing the value of those features being added to Ubuntu.
- If Ubuntu did not do this, then they are complete fools who will quickly be overtaken by other distributions. Since that hasn't happened, I'm guessing they are following basic business practice here.
- I think it would be awesome if Ubuntu were able to skin off every feature OpenSuse 11 and Fedora has in advantage, but the implementation time may set the release at which this will eventually happen.
If the idea is good enough, the developers will hear about it one way or another. A lot of what happens in distros get shared in GNOME, KDE or other upstream projects, so they're really not missing out on much.