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 A rolling release has the advantage that once I set up someone who is not that much into linux, his system never gets out of date as long as he/she does stable updates whenever needed.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 -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
