The DCCA or Debian Core Consortium Association.

This is a group that has the big Debian based distros and Debian discussing the divergence issues. This one doing this work another doing that work, 3 of them duplicating each others work... etc.

The whole premise behind the DCCA is to reduce time-to-release and to enhance what everyone wants and to be 100% compatible on *AT LEAST* the Core programs and libraries, Kernels, etc...

Since it took a LONG time for Debian Sarge to come along, Debian started to splinter into groups that just wanted to get stuff shipped with reasonable effort and within reasonable timeframe to even matter. There are a few things that this will accomplish.

1. Make a single Moving target for ISVs to aim for to support 10+ Debian Distributions
2. Ability to syncronize and keep the "Core" releaseable at any time
3. Cause other issues with non-core things to be marginalized during a release cycle
4. Competitors using Debian based packages can benefit and give benefit at the same time
5. Allow for more reasonable release cycles and security fixes
6. Support for the core components could be extended for 5 years+
7. More adoption of apt packaging for more things like Oracle, EMC, etc...

In that list, I honestly believe they will be able to garner the support they need to influence the ISVs to support the DCC with the software they build/write.

Hopefully, this will actually make things better, not worse. AS we all know Debian Proper is an ALL Volunteer organization... and the DFSG doesn't allow for coercion to do tasks.