On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Fedora would appear to be out of line in not taking on board the >> potential user base for a rolling release version. For servers there >> would be huge advantages in management of systems. > > Can you list what advantages there are over doing a yum upgrade to the > next release? The number of problems that have been reported to the lists for yum upgrades seems very large. Although for any rolling release there have been occasions where unforeseen problems have arisen the day to day updates have been largely routine and trouble free.... hence from what I have observed from the lists rolling releases (which of course are generally a small percentage of the package set) are much less problematic than one giant upgrade to all packages. Also yum upgrades only occur once the next system version is released whereas rolling release means that individual components can be updated as soon as they release upstream. In Fedora for example we see systemd38 only in rawhide and not in the current f16 - so f16 users will not have the benefit of the newest systemd until f17 is released unless there is a major change of policy. Equally if there is a major release of the next version of KDE or Gnome, or other major components like the kernel there is often a delay before they are available in the current released system. An example is that only today does kernel 3.2.1 appear in f16 repos - in arch it has been available from almost as soon as it was released. I have been running the new kernel without issue from the first appearance of the package. > >> Is there any support at all within the development community for a >> rolling release version of Fedora (and possibly ulitimately Redhat)? >> Is there a possibility that not moving to rolling release could >> ultimately damage Fedora in the future as other distributions increase >> their support base? > > How is rawhide not a rolling release? Or perhaps better asked, what > about rawhide makes it > unsuitable for use as a rolling Fedora release? Rawhide is often very very very unstable and only really suitable for experienced linux users - and not for general consumption. It can occasionally become unbootable, things can break in very major ways and not all that infrequently - which is fine if you want to test at the cutting edge and when new things are being developed... rolling release is more for someone who can rely on an expectation that the system will almost always work except on rare occasions when some manual intervention might be needed or perhaps a package downgrade to get going again. With rawhide I believe the expectation is that the system can break at any time and rawhide users should not expect stability - so a very different philosophy. In any event rolling release can have not only stable and testing repos, as well as devel repos, which means it is up to the user to then choose what level of risk there is in their system - but in choosing stable that the rolling release system it can still be much more up to date than for many distros that release periodically, and yet not have a major "upgrade" or re-install every 6 months - but a much gentler path to pretty up to date major packages with only smaller bumps most of the time and the really really nice feature that you do not have the major hiccup of complete installs/upgrades on a regular basis. > -- > devel mailing list > devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel -- mike c -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
