Proposal: Rolling Release

[Les Mikesell]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 11.11.2008 22:42, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 15:23 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Which repos have a chance to rebuild against new fedora libraries 
>>> before they are publicly available so a user updating with both 
>>> enabled won't experience conflicts?
>> Every repo.  Our build roots are public and static repo locations are
>> updated hourly with their contents.  It's all public, anybody in the
>> would can access it.
> 
> As someone that takes care of a 3rd party repo I can mostly agree to 
> this statement from Jesse. But there is one important thing that is not 
> really foreseeable for the public: Pushes to the stable or testing 
> updates repos.
> 
> They just happen suddenly out of the blue and I as 3rd party repo 
> manager have no real chance to do push at exactly the same time. All a 
> 3rd party repo manager can do is to watch fedora-announce-list closely 
> and push packages that have dependencies on specific Fedora packages 
> (xine-lib-extras-nonfree, qmmp-plugins-freeworld, all kmods, some 
> others) once he sees that Fedora did the push.
> 
> That is one of the big problems. Another one: Dependency problems due to 
> mirror lags afaik confuse yum (at least on F8 and F9). Details can be 
> found here:
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-August/msg00041.html

Thank you! That's exactly the point of view that needs to be emphasized 
here, both with respect to the people trying to cooperate with the 
fedora distribution and the users who are affected.

Every time I try to point out the need for 3rd party add-ons here, the 
discussion degenerates into useless rationalization as to why the entire 
universe can't live in the fedora repository. But it doesn't matter why. 
The fact is that it doesn't, never will, and it would be a bad idea for 
everyone to rely on a single source for their critical applications 
even if they could.  We just need an understanding that people will 
always need additional software and they need it to not break when 
updates are pushed out - and if that can't be fixed, next best would be 
a way to back out the breakage or run old/new in parallel while fixing 
compatibility.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail