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

[Kevin Kofler]

Doug Ledford wrote:
> You're assuming that each "flag day" will in fact be one where the user
> has to do something.  That's not necessarily true.  The hda->sda switch
> happened, what, 2 years or more ago?  Yeah, it was a big deal.  We've
> not really had an event like that since, and don't currently have one on
> the horizon.  So, the FUD that 1 flag day per month means we'll actually
> have 1 user intervention required event per month is highly unlikely.

There are many more changes which require user intervention, even if it's 
not as obvious (as in "don't intervene and your system won't boot"). For 
example, after upgrading from F8 to F9, i.e. moving from KDE 3 to KDE 4, I 
had to tweak my desktop configuration in a few places. And even less blatant 
changes sometimes require some sort of user intervention (such as recreating 
some configuration because it's represented differently in the new version 
and upstream didn't provide a way to migrate it automatically).

And required user intervention is not the only source of trouble, things 
like feature regressions, data (e.g. savegame) compatibility etc. are, too.

> You handle a flag day like a mini-release.  It's coordinate, users know
> about it ahead of time, there is no dumping things on people overnight.

Except it's not a mini-release. You can't just stay on the old branch (and 
still get security, bugfix and other nondisruptive updates) if you aren't 
ready for the change as you can with our releases.

        Kevin Kofler