Way off-topic: Meaning of the term "rolling release" (was: Re: Firefox 4 for f14?)

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 25.03.2011, 07:55 -0400 schrieb Genes MailLists:
> On 03/25/2011 07:38 AM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 14:48 -0700 schrieb Henrique Junior:
> > 
> >> It may sound a little off-topic to this thread, but since we are
> >> talking about bring new stuff into F14 I would like to know the
> >> opinion of you, guys, about the new openSUSE's tumbleweed [1] [2]
> >> repo, that tries to bring to openSUSE  some "rolling release"
> >> behaviour.
> > 
> > We do have a rolling release, it's called rawhide.
> > 
>    Thats not really true as I see it - rawhide is more of a rolling
> build than a rolling release. A good rolling release should be a working
> system with a stream of tested updates.

The term "rolling release" does not indicate whether or not something
gets tested. Testing is only possible in a clearly defined environment,
thus it requires (at least some kind of) snapshotting.

>     A good example of a rolling release is the kernel release model.

Each kernel release has clearly defined merge window and a stabilization
phase. This is not rolling but exactly what we do with our development.

Regards,
Christoph