Rolling Release Model(s), Fedora Discussion

[Ranjan Maitra]

Dear friends, 

This is indeed an interesting topic and I am not completely sure which
side I am on. Perhaps a hybrid but more on the side of the rolling
release model after thinking about it for the reasons listed below.

A rolling release has the advantage that once I set up someone who is
not that much into linux, his system never gets out of date as long as
he/she does stable updates whenever needed. I think this is a major
benefit of the rolling release schedule. Otherwise, this will
remain difficult for such people getting one time help because of the
need to upgrade at least once a year. There should be another category
of updates, such as updates needing a reboot, so that anyone updating
should not need to reboot everytime we have an update available: an
user can then choose to update these latter packages when he/she wants
to reboot. 

There is one benefit (to me) to do an upgrade. That is because I often
add rpms to check things out and these bring in all dependencies. Even
if I remove these other rpms, I can not often keep track of all the
dependencies that have come in (and are not needed for anything else
that is installed). An upgrade cleanses my system of such unnecessary
dependencies. Perhaps, it may be beneficial to have a notification which
would provide notification of rpms that can be removed because they are
only there as dependencies of rpms that are being removed. Of course,
it would also be a nice feature to have a notification which lists rpms
containing binaries, none of which have been used for the past (let us
say) three or six months and provide the user with the option to remove
it. 

Under a rolling release schedule, of course, it would not make sense to
have an user installing for the first time on a machine (or someone
wanting to clean up or whatever) to have an user install from three
years ago and then update. Thus, perhaps, we should have releases
called Fedora (versionless) which would contain the ISO's (perhaps once
every three months, let us say) consisting of the current stable rpms.
The other alternative is to have all installs happen on the network from
the current stable repository, but I am not in favor of this model,
because it creates a frustrating experience for installers on slow
network.

Btw, I have to say that my Fedora experience has been fabulous. I have
been one of those people who get my upgrades done in 10-15 minutes
flat. I do not need to backup since I have a separate partition which
contains my data and that part does not get formatted, hence it is a
much smaller part (8 GB for / and twice the RAM for swap) that gets
formatted.

My thoughts for now.

Best wishes,
Ranjan