The question of rolling release?

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> 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.

So how did Arch Linux cope with that particular set of changes?  I
suppose Arch Linux collapsed never to recover?  I think not!

> 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.

That is actually more like rolling release- except that there is no
EOL in a rolling release model! Periodically there are new install or
live isos but an installed system just keeps getting new stufff!

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 believe are NOT what the majority wants and need to be repealed (and be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.

Yup big updates that may sometimes need manual intervention to change
configs - an example is dovecot when it changed to v2 - the configs
changed.  Not insurmountable - but at least without changing
everything else at the  same time it is a lot easier to deal with,
surely?

>
> 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.

Again - how on earth did Arch Linux survive it - and did the arch
users desert that distro in large numbers as a result?  I don't think
so.

-- 
mike c