"Components" page should mention sources for universe

[Raphaël Hertzog]

The page http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/components currently says this about the universe component:
"In universe you can find almost every piece of open source software, and software available under a variety of less open licences, all built automatically from a variety of public sources."

AFAIK Debian is the only source where Ubuntu pulls automatically sources and rebuild them as binary packages (I might be wrong, I'm not very involved in Ubuntu, I'm mainly a Debian developer). The other packages (which are not in Debian but which are in universe) are prepared by the MOTU team and while they might upload packages prepared by third parties there's no automatic process here.

It would be nice to mention the sources used to pull automatically new universe packages. I consider this the logical extension of the bug #154274 that got just fixed (since the ubuntu-debian page points to this page when explaining that there are other sources than Debian for universe).

Thanks for your work.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

This isn't really "universe" specific, because the majority of packages in other Ubuntu components (main/restricted/multiverse) are also pulled automatically from Debian. It's true that there are probably fewer differences between the majority of universe packages and their debian equivalents than happens for the main component, but that isn't universally (ugh) true. In any case, the idea is that all Ubuntu packages get bug fixes from Debian, regardless of their component.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

It's not true that Debian is the only source we sync from, although it is certainly responsible for the vast majority of packages.

[Raphaël Hertzog (hertzog)]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Colin Watson wrote:
> It's not true that Debian is the only source we sync from, although it
> is certainly responsible for the vast majority of packages.

Can you name other sources that you use for automatic sync? It would be
nice to get this documented somewhere.

Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

It's not easy to give a complete list, because we can and occasionally
do sync from an arbitrary URL to a source package. I think the major
ones, though, are Debian (main archive, security, incoming),
www.debian-multimedia.org, repository.maemo.org, and a variety of PPAs
from ppa.launchpad.net. In the past we've gone through apt-get.org and
synced in things that looked worthwhile from there, although I don't
think we've done that for a while now.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Oh, I missed the word "automatically" in your bug report. It's true that
Debian is the only archive from which we sync automatically, in the
sense of running 'sync-source.py -a' daily throughout the early part of
each release cycle. Other archives require manual requests.

[Matthew Nuzum (newz)]

Obsolete, this area of the site has been revamped