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 Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 2012-11-03 at 11:28 +0000, mike cloaked wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> Thanks, Mike, that's a great illustration of the point I was trying to
> make: the Arch model sounds much like what I was trying to suggest for
> Fedora, a simple two-track 'devel' and 'stable' model with QA between
> the tracks. And as you point out, on the face of it it appears to
> involve much less drudgery for maintainers. I have never run Arch, but I
> do get the general impression it provides a sufficiently reliable
> experience for the kinds of users Fedora and Arch have.
>
>
Indeed Adam - I guess the choice for running a rolling release or periodic
stable releases, with updates for some support period, is a choice that the
collective developers need to make, and which then developers are happy to
work with or move to where they feel comfortable.

Having said that, it is clear that both Archlinux and Fedora are mainstream
distributions each with significant numbers of users who treat their
installs with sufficient confidence to use their systems on a day to day
basis as a stable platform. Some Fedora people also run with the
updates-testing repo enabled (or in the case or arch with [testing]
enabled) and are ready to fix problems as they arise with occasional
not-completely-stable updates from time to time.

I have only been running archlinux on three machines for less than a year
but I am pretty happy with the way updates arrive and delighted that, when
major upgrades of desktop packages are released upstream, it is not too
long before they are tested and released to [core] so it is nice to have
the very latest KDE for example, and the latest kernel pretty well too. For
Fedora more recently kernels have been superbly close to upstream for all
releases which I am sure must be valued by the user community.

Nevertheless I am also clear that archlinux with its rolling release model
works and works very well indeed. There have been issues occasionally with
Archlinux with things like glibc, and the /usr move but the vast majority
of users have survived with a combination of clear announcement guides as
well as good wiki entries plus mailing list discussions to help with
individual cases which may have been slightly unusual use cases - such as
one user who had not updated at all for many many months and then did a
huge update which included several key upgrades where an interaction
between the order of manual interventions made things a little messy.

So my personal experience of arch has been a very positive one - there are
differences - for example in arch selinux is not centrally supported -
whereas Fedora has been a prime developer for selinux and the vital policy
packages that go with it and included as default for several releases.
However the ease of maintenance means that for the machines I run with arch
make life easier for me, and with careful config settings I have not come
up against a security problem. Everyone has a free choice.

Arch has also recently moved to systemd as its default init system which
was in fact a reasonably simple process to convert to from initscripts -
(it took about 10 minutes once you had read the documentation!) - the
advantage for arch users is that systemd is the latest upstream or pretty
close to - whereas systemd for F16 is somewhat behind current upstream.

I guess that there is likely to always be a split in opinion of the
developers whenever there is a major fork in philosophy options possible
for which way to go in the future - but in the end one way or another a
decision must be taken when everyone's views have been considered - for an
established distribution there is often inertia against change - and many
will see the change as needing more work than people feel may be possible -
nevertheless in this case demonstrably archlinux works - so it is certainly
possible to have a rolling release model and it already exists.It is simply
a philosophy choice as to which model to work with. As to whether Fedora
would wish to change or not is entirely up to those who do the hard work
writing code and keeping all the tools and packages in working order. So
such discussions as in this thread are important - and at the end of the
day people doing the developing need to be on board with the philosophy of
the distribution or work where they feel comfortable.

There have been long discussions previously and at that time the consensus
was to keep the status quo - I guess people will continue to periodically
go through the thought processes and come to a view for which way from that
point in time to move on... and it may remain the status quo - but may move
on to something new - after all systemd had long discussions too - but it
was adopted in the end!  Selinux had long discussions but in the end was
adopted.

Just a few thoughts to add to the discussion!

-- 
mike c
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