Rolling release model philosophy (was Re: Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule (was Re: f18: how to install into a LVM partitions (or RAID)))

[mike cloaked]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:17:02 -0700
> Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> ..snip...
>
> In my experience, in the last few years, Fedora stable releases have
> become much more stable. My "stable" boxes here at home I have not
> really had to poke at since I upgraded them to Fedora 17. I apply
> updates every few days and things keep working along fine.
>
> In previous cycles there were some real nasty brown paper bag type
> blowups that required me to do things to downgrade or tweak to keep my
> stable version working, that (knock on wood) hasn't happened in f16/f17
> in my experence.
>
> I realize there are bugs and problems that hit, but I think the stable
> updates policy has helped keep those down. (Cue KevinK to come in and
> shout and tell me how wrong I am, etc etc)
>
> I'm personally -1 to any kind of rolling release beyond rawhide.
>
>
There are distributions where a rolling release works very well indeed.
 Perhaps I could inject a couple of lines to think about since I use both
Fedora and Archlinux:

In Fedora what is maintained are 1) Two current releases with stable
updates repos for each. 2) Updates-testing repos for both current stable
releases
and 3) Rawhide where volunteer users can expect potential major breakages
periodically. That is five repos of packages.

In Fedora to keep up to date users need a complete re-install either every
year or every six months on every machine that runs Fedora.

In Archlinux there are two repos - [core] and [testing] - once packages
have been QA tested in [testing] then developers can move packages to
[core] when they feel there is minimal risk of major failure for users of
the stable repos.

In Archlinux to keep up to date users need never do a full re-install again
- but there are occasional periods when configs need to be tinkered with or
manual commands entered as root when a major package upgrade takes place
such as glibc or one or two major packages but this is only occasional.
Provided users keep monitoring the news announcements where manual
intervention is required then they have a system where virtually all major
packages are upstream current or close to that.

A complete re-install takes some hours for each machine (or indeed a yum
preupgrade or similar as well) - manual intervention for the occasional
major update to packages in arch linux takes some minutes usually at most.

For users responsible for a significant number of machines having a rolling
release knowing that all major packages are upstream current or close to
that is a major advantage, and time saving, compared to Fedora's need for
major upgrade of the system or re-install.

Fedora is a bit simpler to install for less experienced users but for
experienced linux admins an arch install is not a major issue.

Both Fedora and Archnlinux are generally cutting edge if they are kept
updated - but the effort to keep updated is very different.

Others may wish to compare Fedora with other distributions also - but one
thought I had was that in Archlinux there are only two repos to maintain -
whilst in Fedora it is 5 repos! One might wonder whether there is less
effort needed to keep up to date by the developers in Arch or Fedora - I
don't have the answer to that question but the devs have more knowledge
about effort needed to maintain all of this to make a proper comparison?

Some discussion and thought about these issues are pertinent to the
discussion in this thread.

-- 
mike c
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