The question of rolling release?

[Kevin Kofler]

Genes MailLists 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
> compound change impact .. and many more people can explore the testing
> repo with only that one single change, which allows kinks to be worked
> out sooner.

Sure, it will be the only change that day, if you're lucky (there's no 
guarantee there won't be multiple changes happening to land at the same 
time), but in exchange, you can be hit with such a change at any moment, 
including when you least expect it (and might not have time to deal with the 
issues that arise), and your only option for escaping the change is not 
updating at all (and not getting security fixes). You also get hit with such 
changes many times a year rather than twice (or even once if you skip every 
other release, as allowed by the Fedora release cycle). I don't think that's 
a win at all.

>    I know you've held this view a while however - when you guys created
> kde-redhat to allow fedora stable users to explore the 'new kde stuff' -
> that is exactly how a rolling release works. You've actually been doing
> it already .. .. :-)

Not really… Yes, kde-unstable is like a rolling release, but of the KDE 
parts only. The whole reason why you'd run kde-unstable rather than Rawhide 
is to NOT get the disruptive changes in all the other components (kernel, 
X.Org X11 etc.), while still testing the very latest KDE SC. And even 
considering that, I don't recommend running kde-unstable on a production 
machine at all.

kde-stable and kde-testing are actually NOT "rolling release" repos, but at 
most "semi-rolling release" as I explained in my mail, i.e. they contain 
only changes which are safe to use as updates. (And these days, we actually 
try to only put things there which are pending for official updates.) For 
F15, we also provide a kde47 repository to provide KDE SC 4.7 as an optional 
upgrade, exactly so you didn't have to use all of kde-unstable (or even 
Rawhide) to get 4.7 before F16. That's a targeted upgrade of a specific 
component in an optional repository (where in fact we discussed for quite 
some time whether it wouldn't have been safe to push as an official stable 
update, i.e. we provided it separately from Rawhide/kde-unstable because it 
was in fact NOT that disruptive) and very far from a rolling release of the 
entire distribution with all the roadbumps.

>   Now if Adam W. would just step up again and offer to drive this
> forward .. Adam?

I don't think it makes sense for an individual to drive this forward without 
any sort of consensus.

        Kevin Kofler