Rolling release Fedora - fantastic idea

[Noah Hall]

Fuduntu Dev here.

I'm not going to bore you all on how great rolling is, and how it's a
great model that works for everyone - I'll assume the good folks of
Fedora have already researched many different models. Instead, what
I'm going to talk about is the feasibility and the logistics.

Fuduntu didn't start out as a rolling release. We had versions for a
while, until we realised we were basically releasing newer snapshots
of our current software with slightly different defaults.

Having discussed it as a team, we decided to move to rolling - less
work for us to handle the repos and create images, less hassle for our
users to reinstall with each release just because we'd changed some
default package or updated something vital to a newer version. Our
users could just update, and we could just create images. Simples.

The transition was painless. I can't say I noticed much fallout, if
any. Perhaps fewt can remember some, but I can't. Our distro is pretty
stable, with new software - something that's a treat in the Linux
world.

However, it costs. Development time, it costs. There's 3 of us
packaging things, along with 3 newly initiated interns. It also costs
our users to some extent - there's no easy way for them to prevent
something upgrading. They have to roll with the flow. This doesn't
work out great for everyone. A project doing the same for Fedora would
need the backing of experienced developers with time or payment.