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

> 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.

Maybe this is more of a Debian question since a lot of Ubuntu packages come from Debian, but what process is used to deprecate unmaintained packages?

If a package is abandoned (i.e. there is no current maintainer), how is it determined if a package should be updated and maintained by Debcrafters or someone else?

Is there any kind of download metrics to know if a package is used?

How would package maintenance be prioritized?

> The first prototype of debcraft will focus on unifying the current workflow adopted by most Ubuntu Developers at Canonical.

Is it the same debcraft as the Debian one? https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debcraft

500 server error is not a good look for an official ubuntu webpage XD

> > 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.

Do they play Starcraft?

Jon is a breath of fresh air for the Ubuntu project.

what's Debian's trademark on .deb , debian, and the release names? While I understand Debcrafters technically refers to the .deb format, to the uninitiated it sounds like a Debian project not an ubuntu one.

Debian branding is an important signal of quality. Ubuntu has always seemed like a lower quality product.

Hopefully this makes things easier and simpler for users? Not being a Linux application developer or maintainer, I always wondered why we needed snaps, flatpaks, etc when we have .deb packages. I just like doing 'apt install something'. As a user, I prefer one central way to manage software and have the complexity automatically handled behind the scenes. It's great when things are open so I can dig into that stuff if I want to. But I shouldn't really need to.

If you currently run `apt install debcraft` in Ubuntu, you will get the tool built by me. It has largely the same goals as Canonical has expressed in this and similar docs, but no Launchpad integration. If you want to collaborate on making .deb maintenance easier, faster and more secure across all of the Debian and Ubuntu ecosystems, please reach out. You can use the "book a chat" link on my site https://optimizedbyotto.com/.