The question of rolling release?

[Kevin Kofler]

mike cloaked wrote:
> Is there any support at all within the development community for a
> rolling release version of Fedora (and possibly ulitimately Redhat)?

No. We've had this discussion many times. It just doesn't work.

There are changes like KDE 4 or GNOME 3 which can't just be pushed as an 
update in a smooth way. A rolling release will always have such choking 
points.

Where we can get to is "semi-rolling", i.e. push version upgrades as updates 
to stable releases wherever safe, but not the disruptive changes. In fact, 
that's what we did before the new stable update policies which I still 
believe are NOT what the majority wants and need to be repealed (and be 
replaced by a policy which ensures that packages will be consistently 
upgraded, without the "I maintain package XYZ and I don't believe in version 
upgrades for stable releases, so there will be none" nonsense). Want the 
disruptive changes? Then yum upgrade to the latest release. Otherwise you 
only get the safe ones.

But a fully rolling release just cannot work (and this is also why all those 
"just use Rawhide if you want the latest", "usable Rawhide" etc. suggestions 
are fundamentally flawed). Yes, there are distros doing this, but they all 
have one thing in common: doing a migration like the KDE 4 migration is a 
big PITA in them.

        Kevin Kofler