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

Ahmad Samir ahmadsamir3891 at gmail.com
Sat Oct 2 18:59:55 CEST 2010


On 2 October 2010 14:50, Jérôme Martin <mageia at delaur.net> wrote:
> Le vendredi 1 octobre 2010, Olivier Méjean a écrit :
>> Le vendredi 1 octobre 2010 08:51:34, atilla ontas a écrit :
>
>> > What's your opinion?
>>
>> What about a rolling distribution ? As an user (just plain user) i do not
>> think that installing a distribution is a goal, just a mean to use my
>> computer, so i wish i could not spend time installing a distribution every
>>  6 months or every year.
>>
>
> My opinion is nearly the same: what is the need to provide a new version each
> 6 months? The marketing point of view is not a valid answer since we do not
> need to satsify shareholders or follow the market.
>

Yes, but you have a distro to maintain, a reputation to uphold...

> So when a new version is needed? My point of view is that a new version is
> needed when a big change will occur for exemple a new major release of KDE or
> gnome, Xorg, perl, python, jdk, ...
>
> We need to change our view. Actually, the date of the release is decide and
> the deciders (maketting, CEO, CTO, ?) choose which softwares will be include.
> I propose to look at release date of the main softwares and decide when a new
> version will be proposed.
>

Hmm, no, IINM, that would be the release engineers job.

> For smaller software, we do not need to wait for a new version of the distro.
> Just provide it as we do with the backport repository.

New version => new features + new bugs; anyone who ran cooker for a
good amount of time have witnessed this fact....

>
> And no, rolling distro does mean use cauldron, since the system is not
> supposed to work properly and where critical breakage can appear.
>
>

Ah, yes, so you want a rolling release, just like Cauldron will be,
but that's not broken; now how should one go about guaranteeing that
this will actually work out OK?

A rolling distro means double work for the devs and packagers as a new
version may just introduce new bugs too, now they don't provide the
new versions in a controlled development release where you're warned
that "this is a development release not suitable for day-to-day
production machines", or in a "unsupported backports" repo, no, it'll
just go to the stable release too.....

Now don't only think about a Mageia installation on a personal
computer, where even if the system is totally hosed you can easily do
a new install or restore a backup (then update to latest), but you
also have to bear in mind users who have servers doing all sorts of
jobs, they want stability over new-shiny-versions; the same goes for
school/university labs... etc.

-- 
Ahmad Samir


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