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

Ahmad Samir ahmadsamir3891 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 5 15:47:20 CEST 2010


On 5 October 2010 15:28, Tux99 <tux99-mga at uridium.org> wrote:
>
>
> Personally I think the way Mandriva maintains both updates and backports
> for each release is a waste of resources.
>

How is it a waste?

A practical example is the college professor / school teacher (see
Fernando Parra post a few emails back); he doesn't want to upgrade the
boxes in the lab, he doesn't care if they have the newest/shiniest
versions, just that the distro is stable and works(tm). The same
applies for a company, servers... etc. We aren't talking only about
personal boxes that can break without too much drastic consequences.

> I do agree that Mageia should be a semi-rolling distro.
>
> By "semi rolling distro" I mean the following:
>
> Release a distro every 8-12 months (the exact cyle is not the point I'm
> debating here, it could be 6 months too, it doesn't mater for the concept
> I'm trying to explain).
>
> Provide updates/security patches for all the basic stuff that has a lot of
> dependencies (kernel, core libs, kde, gnome, xorg, etc.).
>
> Provide newer release rather than backported security patches for all other
> apps.
>
> In other words, backports (rather than backported security fixes) should be
> the rule for everything apart from the core system stuff that has loads of
> dependencies.
>
> This would reduce the space requirements on the mirrors and it would mean
> that Mageia is a "rolling distro" for most apps, making it more attractive
> compared to ubuntu/Fedora/opensuse and at the same time reduce the workload
> for packagers.
>
>

Again a rolling distro is something that's not clearly defined. And to
be honest, a rolling distro isn't suitable for new or inexperienced
users. Simply because you can't guarantee that a new package won't
introduce regressions (or totally break an app), in this case an
experienced user will know how to revert to an older version, a new or
inexperienced user won't.

Look at the rolling distros that've been mentioned, Debian or Gentoo,
right? would anyone recommend Debian or Gentoo for a
new/inexperienced/non-power user?

-- 
Ahmad Samir


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