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

[Simon Lukasik]

On 11/03/2012 12:30 AM, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-11-02 at 16:04 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>> * Upgrading every year, with an unreliable upgrade process, is not
>> something you have to do with a proper stable OS
> 
> On some stable OSs you cannot upgrade *at all*. It is true that some OSs
> are maintained for longer time. A short release cycle puts a lot more
> emphasis on working updates, but to be honest I haven't had huge issues
> with Fedora, no more than I used to with debian/ubuntu
> There are some cases were it went south on some releases and I had to
> manually handle it. But then if that's a problem we could simply create
> a /home partition by default and users can choose to reinstall just the
> OS and keep the /home intact.
> For a desktop that should be ok in all cases where you fear an upgrade
> would be too dangerous.
> 
>> * We do not insist on a level of polish or lack of functional regression
>> in our stable releases which is any way consistent with a true
>> productized general purpose OS
> 
> Maybe if we cut stable releases to 1 we can improve this ?
> 
> The only real reason we maintain N-2 is that forcing a 6mo update on
> everyone is just ridiculous, but a 1y cycle seems reasonable enough, and
> with a rolling devel release there would be less reason for frequent
> stable releases.
> 

I like where this is going, here is another view or counter proposal to
rolling updates.

Currently, each Fedora release is kept alive for 13(+/-) months. There
were dozens of threads about shortening or prolonging period -- but I am
not sure if something like the following has been ever discussed:

Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==1 -- is alive for 7 months.
Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==2 -- is alive for 7 months.
Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==0 -- is alive for 19 months.

Additionally, maintainers might be encouraged to push their system wide
changes into N%3==1. As well as they might be encouraged to make the
Fedora N%3==0 their best bread.

--
Simon Lukasik