Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
[...] I am sure plenty of Ubuntu code finds it's way back into Debian, [...]
Are you? Why?
This has been a controversial topic for at least a few years. I think Andrew Suffield posted a typical comment in May 2005:-
"Ubuntu considers it more effective to spend their time on PR to make people think they are giving stuff back, than to actually do it; it generates more 'goodwill', since most people won't bother to check." http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/05/msg01468.html
In July 2007, Lucas Nussbaum proposed trying to track this. The first results have just been linked at http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=271
That's 192 bugs, including 88 resolved. #354516 seems the oldest bug, filed about 675 days ago. In that time, there seem to have been about 100,000 bugs reported to debian, including about 50,000 fixed. (Sources: http://merkel.debian.org/~don/cgi/search.cgi?phrase=Delivered-To%3A+submit%4... http://merkel.debian.org/~don/cgi/search.cgi?phrase=fixed&search=search&... )
I don't know where to get the numbers for Ubuntu, but it seems that not much traffic is going between the two, compared to how much is going on in total. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ reports that it has 906 bugs fixed elsewhere - even if all of those are fixed in debian, that's still like 0.1% of bug traffic in the last two years.
This isn't to say that Ubuntu *isn't* giving back to debian. It's just to say that I can't assess it. I remember almost as many unhelpful actions done to debian by Ubuntu developers as helpful ones.
Regards,