Proposal: Rolling Release

[Les Mikesell]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 
> How does that answer my question? Let me repeat. I've asked what policy it
> is that "forced a horribly fractured 3rd party repository situation"? I'm
> not aware of any such policy.

All I can say is that with Ubuntu you can pick vendor drivers and Sun 
Java 1.5 from the software management tool and you almost never have to 
worry about conflicts among packages from the different repositories. 
I've repeatedly requested these things in fedora and been repeatedly 
told it wasn't going to happen.

 > There simply is not enough man-power
> to spend additional time on coordinating between 3rd party packagers.

That's something that potential users have to take into account when 
choosing the distro they are going run.

> They
> are occupied with the task of keeping packages in their own repo
> compatible with eachother. What hasn't changed in several years, expecting
> individual volunteer packagers to stay informed about a multitude of 3rd
> party repos and coordinating updates and upgrades for ultimate inter-repo
> compatibility is still a tall order.

Which make the effort that Ubuntu (with the help of the underlying 
debian packages) makes particularly outstanding.  The point of using any 
distribution instead of rolling your own linux from scratch is that 
others theoretically have worked together to make sure that everything 
is compatible. If a distro doesn't arrange for this kind of cooperation 
it can't provide what users need and expect.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com