The question of rolling release?

[Scott Schmit]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 10:46:42PM -0500, Genes MailLists wrote:
> On 01/25/2012 10:01 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Bryan Quigley <gquigs at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It's pretty simple, really.  Basically, if we don't keep the kernel on at
> > least a somewhat recent release the amount of work required to support
> > that release grows beyond what we can realistically maintain.
> 
> ...
> 
> > Hopefully that helps explain what we're thinking when we go about doing
> > what we do.  As usual, sorry for being overly verbose.
> 
>   A great explanation - and a nice summary of why a rolling release
> makes sense for many of the same reasons .. :-)

Except that this doesn't burn people often because Linus is also *very*
strict about interface changes between the kernel & userspace.

Can you say the same about GNOME? KDE? gcc? subversion? (Yes, they have
rules about when they're allowed to break backward compatibility, but
they are allowed to do it at certain version changes.)

Somehow I doubt you'll be very happy with your rolling release if you
update your machine right before a major customer demo or other Big
Important Time-Sensitive Event, and the thing(s) you need to make it
happen break--not because of bugs, but because unwanted "features" like
configuration file changes, ABI changes, etc made your stuff stop
working until you stop everything and fix whatever changed.

-- 
Scott Schmit
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