Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#1

Post by jnsgruk » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters
discourse.ubuntu.com

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#2

Post by jnsgruk » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive.

The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like Debian, Arch Linux, NixOS and others are encouraged to join the team, and will even get paid to contribute one day per week to those projects to foster learning and idea sharing

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#3

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

jnsgruk wrote: post #2

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive. The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like…

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#4

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #3

jnsgruk wrote: post #2

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive. The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like…

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

Nope, they're still pushing it:

> In the coming weeks our Starcraft team (responsible for Snapcraft, Rockcraft 1, Charmcraft) will begin prototyping debcraft, which will (in time) become the de facto method for creating, testing and uploading packages to the Ubuntu archive.

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#5

Post by loloquwowndueo » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 4:06 PM UTC

jnsgruk wrote: post #2

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive. The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like…

> others are encouraged to join the team

What are the requirements for joining? Will I be asked about my high-school grades? Pass a psychometric test?

Thanks.

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#6

Post by bArray » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #3

jnsgruk wrote: post #2

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive. The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like…

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

I wish they would stop with snap, snaps have been nothing but a pain. Ubuntu keep pushing half-baked ideas into the wild - who asked for a system that would randomly kill apps without warning? It's like the Rust SSH thing, they are going to make it the default whether you like it or not, even though they know it is not 1:1 and probably never will be.

I'm currently having an issue with Firefox where it will not stop crashing all of the time, even whilst using Hackernews. Not a RAM or CPU issue, just buggy software pushed through a "move fast and break things" attitude.

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#7

Post by geodel » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #5

jnsgruk wrote: post #2

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive. The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like…

> others are encouraged to join the team What are the requirements for joining? Will I be asked about my high-school grades? Pass a psychometric test? Thanks.

One of the key requirement is high on sarcasm and low on contribution.

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#8

Post by loloquwowndueo » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

bArray wrote: post #6

rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

I wish they would stop with snap, snaps have been nothing but a pain. Ubuntu keep pushing half-baked ideas into the wild - who asked for a system that would randomly kill apps without warning? It's like the Rust SSH thing, they are going to make it the default whether you like it or not, even though they know it is not 1:1 and probably never will be. I'm currently having an issue with Firefox where it will not stop c…

Google “remove snaps Ubuntu 24.04” (or whichever version you’re on). I did so, nuked all snaps and replaced Firefox with an upstream Deb repository. Everything’s working fine so far.

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#9

Post by neilv » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

> In the coming weeks our Starcraft team (responsible for Snapcraft 2, Rockcraft 5, Charmcraft 1) will begin prototyping debcraft, which will (in time) become the de facto method for creating, testing and uploading packages to the Ubuntu archive.

Hopefully this won't in any way adversely affect development and maintenance of packages for Debian.

Nobody wants embrace-extend-extinguish, nor poaching of volunteers, nor Debian starting to get second-hand packaging that goes to Ubuntu first, etc., even accidentally.

> The Debcrafters must spend the majority of their work time on Ubuntu, but they will be encouraged to spend a day per week contributing to other distributions to gain understanding, and bring fresh perspectives to Ubuntu (and the reverse, hopefully!). This will be structured as a literal day per week, agreed with the team management - for example “I work on NixOS on Tuesdays”.

That's a good open source company practice. And takes some of the edge off of Ubuntu getting so much mileage out of Debian effort, but making the brand all their commercial one.

I'll still continue to be all about Debian Stable, since it's actually been better for production use than Ubuntu has been for me.

Re: Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

#10

Post by simion314 » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

bArray wrote: post #6

rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

I wish they would stop with snap, snaps have been nothing but a pain. Ubuntu keep pushing half-baked ideas into the wild - who asked for a system that would randomly kill apps without warning? It's like the Rust SSH thing, they are going to make it the default whether you like it or not, even though they know it is not 1:1 and probably never will be. I'm currently having an issue with Firefox where it will not stop c…

I like using snap on my LTS servers, I can test new CLI tools there and see if the new version has soem fixes that I need or not, if the snap works better I can use it without messing around with installing some PPA to update the tool and it's dependencies.