Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule (was Re: f18: how to install into a LVM partitions (or RAID))

[Tom Lane]

Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com> writes:
> Quoting Michael Cronenworth (2012-11-01 18:33:24)
>> I've wanted to write up a blog post about my plan for a rolling release,
>> but I'll post a snip-it here.

> I recently came up with similar 3-layer idea.

In my little corner of the system, the main thing that causes
distro-level issues is new upstream versions of libraries, carrying
API/ABI breaks.  (Recent examples include the libpng 1.2.x -> 1.5.x
and libtiff 3.9.x -> 4.0.x upgrades.)  To push one of those into
rawhide, we at least have to rebuild all dependent packages, and
typically some of them need source-level patches too.  In the current
model, once that's been done in rawhide, the problem is over: all those
packages will propagate to release branches together.  ISTM a rolling
release would make this sort of thing enormously more complicated.
Almost certainly, not all those packages would be at similar levels of
stability and so there would be no point at which they could all get
pushed to any stable branch.  How would you handle that without creating
a huge amount of extra work for packagers?  Keep in mind this type of
thing happens *constantly*, probably a dozen times per release cycle
across the whole distro.  Any significant extra burden is going to be
insupportable.

			regards, tom lane