[Mageia-dev] Release cycles proposals, and discussion

[David W. Hodgins]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:28:04 -0400, Renaud MICHEL <r.h.michel+mageia at gmail.com> wrote:

> On lundi 13 juin 2011 at 23:06, Thorsten van Lil wrote :
>> A rolling release has following advantages:
>> 1. the distribution is always up to date (also hardware support)
>> 2. no re-install over and over again
>
> I don't get it why people think a re-install is necessary.
> My current computer was installed with mandriva 2007 (don't remember if it
> was .0 or .1), it is now mageia 1 and has been updated to all intermediary
> mdv releases.

My currently running install started as Mdv 2009.1, updated via urpmi to
2010.2, then converted to Mageia cauldron during beta 1.

With a little over 4400 packages, the upgrade from one release to the next
takes over 8 hours, on this single core Celeron processor, so even though
it's not an actual re-install, it still feels like one. /usr alone is 13GB.

One possibly annoying part about that, is that there are many rpm packages
where the only obvious change is the version.  I understand that for many
of the packages, they have to be rebuilt due to perl/python/glib version
changes, but anyone who doesn't know that will see what seems like a lot
of unneeded updates.

One con of a rolling release has been demonstrated by Cauldron over the last
few days.  With the perl/gnome updates, it takes a few days for all of the
needed packages to get built.  For a couple of days, running urpmi with
--auto-select wanted to remove most of gnome.  I waited till the needed
packages were available, whereas a less technical user may have ended up
removing key parts of their desktop manager.

Regards, Dave Hodgins