The question of rolling release?

[Mark Bidewell]

I have used Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch. I believe the ideal is a
combination of the three
1)  A pure rolling release like Arch, upgrades packages when they are
stable without regard to external impacts.  The early adoption of
Python 3  in Arch broke many packages and took awhile to fix.
2)  Ubuntu has 6 month releases and 2 year LTS releases.  PPAs allow
upgrading of some packages without touching the core system.
3)  Fedora gives rapid shipping of latest packages.

In my mind an ideal linux distro would break up the package set into:

1) User - These are packages that users want rapid access to the
latest (Examples Firefox, Libreoffice)
2) System - These are packages that better be stable and working
without external breakage before being pushed but still readily
available (Examples: X11, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Perl, Python).
3) Core - These packages represent the base system needed to operate
these packages should move with utmost caution (Examples:  kernel,
gcc, glibc, shell).  A somewhat stable kernel ABI would help, but that
is not happening.

Recommended Cycles for major upgrades for each group:
1) User - As soon as possible.
2) System - 6 months.
3) Core - 12-18 months.

-- 
Mark Bidewell
http://www.linkedin.com/in/markbidewell