The question of rolling release?

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:59 PM, Jef Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:13 AM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So how did Arch Linux cope with that particular set of changes?  I
>> suppose Arch Linux collapsed never to recover?  I think not!
>
> It would behoove the argument you are making if you could write up the
> summary of how Arch handles technology shifts for us to review,
> instead of challenging us to look it up ourselves.  You've brought up
> Arch as an example, its in your best interest to educate the rest of
> us about how they operate as part of making your argument stick.  Your
> challenge as a rhetorical device doesn't work when the people you are
> challenging do not yet have a vested interest in making the change.
> You do, and thus, and your interests as an advocate of change are best
> served by walking the rest of us through how Arch does disruptive
> change management in their release process.
>

Arch has an extensive wiki and a lot of very helpful forums including
a valuable announce forum

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page
https://bbs.archlinux.org/
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewforum.php?id=24

When there are disruptive changes they try to announce any manual
intervention required once a new package set of this kind is updated -
for example a recent announcement was for the (unstable) KDE 4.8 which
has an extensive discussion about what might be needed to watch out
for as well as the opportunity for users to test it - when it is
considered stable enough it will go out to stable with any suitable
notes for what users will have to change manually after upgrading that
package set.

Another example is the announcement and ensuing discussion when
Gnome3 went to stable:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117876

There appears to be quite extensive and helpful information available
for users when there are major package updates - of course there may
be wrinkles and problems occasionally - but as has been said before in
this thread dealing with the issues when updating a single major
package upgrade is much easier to deal with than upgrading the entire
system with potentially several major upgrades as part of a major
overhaul.

-- 
mike c