[Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?

[Tux99]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Buchan Milne wrote:

> I don't believe that merely changing to some kind of rolling release will 
> improve matters for end users, they will just be more confused when they find 
> out that to install database support for OpenOffice.org, they need to upgrade 
> all of OpenOffice.org (taking an hour to download ~ 70MB), instead of just 
> being able to install openoffice.org-base (with a 2 minute download of 2MB).

This is a misconception, even today with the current Mandriva system the 
user has to download the same 70MB, since security updates are not diffs 
but whole packages.

To make it clearer, if the user wants to install oo-base at a later 
point with the currend Mdv model he would have to download 20MB if there 
has been no security updates since release, or 70MB if there has been a 
security update in the meantime.

Exactly the same would be the case with a light rolling distro.

People who say that a light rolling distro (i.e. where only app upgrades 
are made available mid-cycle, not the core packages) will increase 
downloads for users are simply not thinking this through.

No one is forced to download and install the upgrades, a user can just 
only install those upgrades which are also security updates, just like 
he/she would do with the current Mdv model.

A security update or an upgrade imply roughly the same download size, 
since in both cases the whole package is downloaded again, what differs 
is only the version that's being downloaded not the size.

The only real difference between the light rolling distro model 
deescribed earlier in this thread by a few people (including myself) and 
the current Mdv release model, is that security updates of apps are 
provided through version upgrades whenever this is possible, i.e. 
when the version upgrade is not a major upgrade with incompatible 
changes.