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)))

[Simo Sorce]

On Sat, 2012-11-03 at 00:44 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> > much lower levels of churn,
> 
> No they actually have way higher levels of churn ... just think about
> it ... in fedora we are talking about 6 months worth of chrun not 5+
> years. Can't speak for Red Hat but maybe this is one of the reasons
> why they don't support upgrades.
> 
nope, Adam is right, the level of churn is *a lot* lower.

Microsoft rarely changes existing components, and never breaks ABIs no
matter what, at most they add new stuff.

And when they do need to make a lower level change they design it in
early stages and then spend a lot of time testing even 3rd party apps to
make sure they don't break them all, and for more popular ones they even
built workarounds in the system so they don't break.

Also their package set is a lot smaller. They do not package a lot of
applications like we do. However the main differentiator is ABI
stability, MS simply has a *lot* less issues on upgrades because they
have an ABI stability that we can only dream of, in the FOSS world.

The only component that is comparable is the kernel. Almost everything
else in user space is just not comparable.

note that this is "also" our strength in some respect because it allows
the system to evolve a lot more quickly, but it also means upgrades are
simply going to break stuff, and that's not so great for desktop
environments and scare the hell off of 3rd party vendors.
You may notice we do not have many 3rd party vendors, I think ABI
instability is reason number, 1, 2 and 3 of why we can't have reliable
third parties with a community built OS.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York