Proposal: Rolling Release

[Les Mikesell]

Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> 
>>> Are you suggesting that we should never provide an unstable interface
>>> in any of the libraries or scripting modules that we package?
> 
>> No, I'm saying that necessary changes should be planned, and to the
>> extent possible, batched at version releases.
> 
> That means even more of the bureaucracy that people are so quick to
> disparage here...

But just regarding timing the move from rawhide to release, and it would 
be less arbitrary if the answer was always 'release at a version 
release' unless you are fixing something horribly broken as shipped.

>>                                                And where that isn't
>> possible, interface and command line changes to expect should be
>> published before the update so users and 3rd parties know how to work
>> around the breakage.
> 
> That isn't always obvious to the packager of some piece of infrastructure.
> Change GCC, the "normal" applications continue compiling fine (or get fixed
> as part of the update in the distributin), but some strange package
> somewhere was relying on a GCC bug (or misfeature, or sloppiness) and blows
> up when you try to build it. Has happened dozens of times to me, and I'm
> still grateful GCC moves forward and becomes more standards-conforming.

Being grateful it moves is one thing.  Being surprised when it regresses 
mid distro-version is something else.  The problem is that every update 
is not 'forward'.

> 
>> Who forces you to push interface-changing updates out of rawhide?
> 
> New upstream versions... go talk to them ;-)

That makes sense as a reason to go into rawhide.  Why do they have to go 
into production before a release point?

>>                                                                   If
>> I wanted today's bugs from an upstream project I'd grab it from there
>> instead of using a distribution's release version of the code.   The
>> fedora major release cycle is already fast enough anyway.
> 
> It is fast /because/ it integrates upstream changes as early as
> possible. Can't have fast advances and no change at the same time.

If you want rawhide you can run rawhide.  Otherwise what's so important 
that it can't wait for a release point?

>>                                                            If some
>> upstream project can't settle on an interface you are doing your users
>> a favor by keeping it away from them.
> 
> OK. Leave out the kernel, ...

If there were a nexenta-like flavor of fedora (our familiar userland on 
top of opensolaris) I'd certainly give it a shot.  Otherwise the 
overwhelming need to constrain and manage Linux kernel changes keeps 
several large corporations in business.

>>                                                    What I'd really
>> want is for LSB-compliance to someday get to the point where programs
>> running on Fedora would never need to know that it is fedora at all,
>> much less the version and last-update-date underneath.
> 
> LSB and similar standards mean aiming at the lowest common denominator.
> I.e., it might work just fine, but it will certainly waste much of what
> Fedora (or any other particular distribution) is all about

If people can't agree that the interfaces/libraries are the right way to 
do things, then there's a pretty good chance that they aren't, and that 
they will probably change or go away soon.  I don't have time to waste 
chasing a lot of things that are going to change and break underneath 
the things that might depend on them.

>> Is there someone involved in development that eats his own dog food
>> (i.e. uses fedora with current updates as infrastructure for some
>> large project or even in a lab setting with many users)?
> 
> I'm using Fedora rawhide daily. Our labs (several hundred users) are
> running latest Fedora most of the time (except when the releases fall at
> awkward times in our terms).

Do the users ever have things break because libraries changed under 
them?  Is this the sort of lab where work progresses over years or 
decades or where the universe is re-created every semester?  The latter 
doesn't exactly match the real world.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com