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)))

[Matěj Cepl]

On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:53:37 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> That's called CentOS,
> Nope ... CentOS/RHEL is a different end of extremes.
> 
> 7 years+ life-time, no API changes, etc.

> What is lacking is a middle ground between "Fedora" and "CentOS".
> 
> Something with a life-time of "~2 years", with API increments etc.

I am not saying that you are completely wrong, because you are not, but I 
would remind you that this thread started (at least for me) with adamw 
admission that we are not managing well even 13-month-distro, so I am 
afraid we don't have a luxury to think about ~2 years one at all.

Moreover, RHEL/CentOS is not a Debian/stable, i.e, it is not 100% frozen 
(no API changes is just for kernel and core libraries, IIRC), and there 
are (especially in desktop land) some rebases, so I found it for my 
wife's usecase pretty useful. Looking at her computer I see 
firefox-10.0.10-1.el6_3.i686.rpm and 
libreoffice-3.4.5.2-16.1.el6_3.i686 ... certainly not a bleeding edge,  
but not unusably old.

On the top of that, the past is not an indicator of the future (and I DO 
NOT say anything about the future ... NDA, not talking for my employer, 
etc.) but new releases of RHEL usually come in some ~2-3 years you 
desired, so if you are willing to reinstall with every new RHEL/CentOS 
(or with version x.1, which is quite common), then that could be your 
desired system.

Just saying,

Matěj