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

[Buchan Milne]

On Wednesday, 6 October 2010 07:15:15 Raphaël Jadot wrote:
> 2010/10/6 Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org>:
> > I do. I even update them more often. And you would be surprised to see
> > that it doesn't create as much problem as you can think, if the sysadmin
> > is competent enough.
> 
> However many small companies can't pay a competent enough sysadmin.
> 
> It's why they often choose what seems for them the most simple solution.
> 
> I certainly don't know which is the best for a distro, but as long as
> there will be so much sweat and "fear" about upgrading a distro, there
> will be this recurrent discussion.

Without changing anything else, just changing from a "release, with QA'd 
updates, and non-QA'd backports-based distribution" to a "rolliing release", 
IMHO you are just changing the problem from "fear about upgrading distro" to 
"fear about installing or upgrading any package". The risk moves from being a 
biannual event with release notes and errata, to a constant event with no fixed 
answers.

If you disagree, run cooker for > 6 months with 'urpmi --auto-update' in 
cron.daily. If you never have *any* issues, without any breakage at all, I 
might believe you.

(I have run cooker on my "production desktop" for a number of years, but not 
in the past 15 months as I haven't been able to risk breakage due to time 
pressure - plus I'm a bit short on bandwidth)

> I know that they have not as much users as mandriva do, and also they
> are young, but unity linux started with the idea of a small core with
> long term release, and branches that add packages such as desktop, wm,
> de etc. that can have a short term release.

Remember of course that Unity leverages the *existing* (source) packages from 
Mandriva. However, I haven't actually used a Unity release, so I am not sure 
how well upgrading has worked over a > 1 year period.

Regards,
Buchan