Re: [Hampshire] Debian to Ubuntu, without complete reinstall…

On Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:40:09 +0100, john lewis <johnlewis@???>
wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:34:05 +0100
> David Ramsden <david@???> wrote:
>> Unfortunately the package is provided by a 3rd party vendor, via
>> their own repository.
>>
>> The latest major release of the package is Ubuntu only. I could
>> probably download the .deb and get it to work but then I may run the
>> risk of hitting a bug and the answer being "it's because you're not
>> running Ubuntu".
>>
>> The reason behind this is because the product can also run as a
>> virtual appliance using VMware. I've been told that Debian is no
>> longer VMware certified but Ubuntu is. Therefore the software vendor
>> has decided to ditch Debian with newer versions of their product.
>
> This make me fume! Ubuntu is "supposed" to be a derivative of Debian
> and packages developed by Ubuntu developers were "supposed" to be
> compatible with the parent distro or at least passed back to Debian to
> be made compatible (/me simplifies a bit)

It's the ISVs you should lobby! If VMWare have dropped official support for
Debian, it can only be because they perceive less demand for support.

If that in turn has lead other ISVs to move to Ubuntu from Debian, well you
can hardly blame them. And you can hardly blame the customers of those ISVs
for wanting to stick to the supported platform. If you'd got the software
working on Debian but then phoned up with a support issue, you'd just be
told to go away, probably!

Tony