The question of rolling release?

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Genes MailLists <lists at sapience.com> wrote:

>  Moving any large change has challenges - whether periodic or rolling.
>
>  In that sense, they are no different - both can be a PITA.
>
>  However, in a rolling model you have the advantage of it being the
> -only- change you need to do .. which is far less an issue than the

Indeed - also it is also the case that whenever any really significant
change is mooted in any complex system or facility that the first
response is often for everyone to find all the reasons that they can
think of for not making any change since making change means work and
it is scary.  However there are some people who will think carefully
about any proposal and see if the work necessary could lead to a
better overall model for the system.

There have been a few who have expressed some support for the idea of
rolling release - after all in terms of overall work consider the
global effort - if there were rawhide, testing and stable repos (as
now) but the idea of rawhide was to generate new packages that would
be put together to make install isos (or live isos), which could
install new systems as clean installs, and the testing repo was QA
tested for updating new installs, as well as stable previously
installed systems once the bugs were worked through for those two
scenarios then packages could be pushed to stable as tested for both
updating new installed systems and people already running stable.

That way once installed there is no need to maintain and test updates
specifically for the current release.  As an overall workload would
this actually be any more effort than the constant stream of testing
for the "two" current releases - as an overall picture?

Of course anyone could choose to clean install a really old system
that had problems but in general updating small chunks of packages
would be very desirable for users.

-- 
mike c