Proposal: Rolling Release

[Rahul Sundaram]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>
>>> And you may need both old and new versions present while you perform 
>>> the operations an upgrade requires.  So generic package-magic would 
>>> involve being able to install the new version without removing the 
>>> old so you have a chance to do the interactive parts before it is too 
>>> late.
>>
>> Again, this is something upstream project should do. GTK and gstreamer 
>> for example does make this easy.
>>
>> http://www106.pair.com/rhp/parallel.html
>>
>> Working around this at the packaging level is always going to require 
>> elaborate hacks. OpenSUSE did this for shipping KDE 3 and KDE 4 in 
>> parallel but other distributions refused.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the logic of making upstream deal with the 
> problem that RPM's design introduces.  There's rarely an issue if you 
> want to do parallel version installs out of an upstream source - and I'd 
> guess the developers _always_ do that for anything they rely on.

If you read the link above, they don't do much of that in many upstream 
projects and pointing fingers at RPM here doesn't help because no other 
package manager can do magic either. Packagers can hack it to make it 
work but it is pretty difficult.

Rahul