To semi-rolling or not to semi-rolling, that is the question...

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 03/05/2010 06:32 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 08:52:56AM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>>> Make rawhide consumable as a semi-rolling release itself.
>>
>> We already have this it is called early branching of the next release. I
>> would fully agree with you if it were not for the early branching
>> feature, which means we effectively already have such a release, except
>> the first 2 months or so after a release, at which time rawhide
>> tends to be very volatile in general (*), so a stabilized rawhide would
>> pretty much boil down to the latest release anyways.
>>
> This is something I've been toying with in my mind myself.  I like the idea
> of using it better than using rawhide for the same reasons that Till Mass
> mentions in his email.  I haven't been able to completely satisfy myself on
> two points though:
>
> 1) This new tree is supposedly leading towards a new release.  As such,
> there are other pressures on it than simply being a consumable tree.  (For
> instance, updates will be frozen for periods in this tree as alpha and beta
> are spun; the freezes lead to a huge number of updates on release day).  How
> disruptive these pieces are to using this tree as a consumable product in
> its own right is the worry.  However, we haven't yet run a full release of
> no-frozen-rawhide so we don't know precisely how annoying the problems would
> be or how easily solvable.
>

Yes it will be frozen every now and then, so it is semi rolling not continously
rolling. So people who want something between stable and semi -rolling could even
only update at moments when the tree is frozen (and thus known to be relatively
problem free).

> 2) The new tree is not consumable all the time because there are times when
> it does not exist.  As you also mention, there is the period right after
> release when the unrelease tree does not exist.  There's only F-current
> (which would be taking less updates under a policy that anticipates people
> who want semi-rolling to be consuming the F-current+1 tree) and rawhide
> (which, as you say, is very volatile at this time.)  In fact, this is
> probably the time period in which a semi-rolling tree would be most useful
> to people (as at other times of the cycle, maintainer laziness would make
> rawhide closer to the current+1 tree and therefore more consumable)  Do you
> have any ideas on what we could do here?
>

Well again I think that a 1 - 2 month window without exciting updates is
quite ok for people who want semi-rolling.

I agree that both issues you mention are not ideal, but IMHO they
are something we can live with, where as the burden of yet another tree
is not something we can live with.

Regards,

Hans