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RE[4]: Does not affect me either
by irbis on Fri 29th Jan 2010 01:43 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Does not affect me either"
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It was my understanding that Ubuntu and Debian did not share repositories, and used a slightly different and incompatible .deb format

Ubuntu and Debian are binary-incompatible, so it is a bad idea to mix Ubuntu and Debian repositories in your /etc/apt/sources.list . But Ubuntu cannot be considered a fork. Ubuntu still compiles most of its non-basic software from Debian unstable source packages, and Ubuntu's basic software management is still very much based on Debian.

Despite binary-incompatibility, it is often safe to install some individual Debian package on Ubuntu, especially such simple deb packages like fonts, for example. However, there have been incompatibilities between Debian and Ubuntu in the default versions of some basic stuff (Python etc.), and nowadays the two use some different basic tools (init system etc.), so installing software that depends on different (versions of) basic things is dangerous. Just like it can be difficult to install a package meant for Ubuntu 9.10 on Ubuntu 8.04, for example.

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