Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 28, 2013, at 05:09 PM, Martin Pitt wrote:

>FWIW, I'm all for this. The past two cycles have demonstrated a
>tremendous increase in daily quality, and starting a RR now will only
>motivate everyone to get even better.

I'm all for it too, as it pretty much mirrors how I actually use and develop
on Ubuntu.

Upgrading my Ubuntu servers is a big deal for me, so I use LTS releases there.
I certainly don't want to have to think about them more often than every 2
years.

On the desktop though, I love being on the bleeding edge, so a rolling release
reminds me fondly of my Gentoo days (where you never said the word "upgrade"
:) without the mind numbing wait for compilations.  Over the past several
cycles, as Rick points out, the QA has gotten so good that I have almost no
qualms about working on a rolling release.  Long gone are the days where a
`apt-get upgrade` has broken my system (knock on wood) and while I do inspect
dist-upgrades a little more carefully, they are usually pretty reliable too.

In a weird way, 6 month cycles feels both too long and too short.

>>  * Take a monthly snapshot of the development release, which we support
>> only until the next snapshot
>
>This is the main point where I have doubts and questions:
>
> * What does "support" mean for the monthly snapshots? Hopefully not
>   security updates, SRUs, and backports? That would ruin pretty much
>   all the savings that we do from dropping the interim releases.
>
> * What is the purpose of these snapshots, i. e. who would use them?
>   If all our published daily images are good enough to install, boot,
>   and get you into a desktop, and we wouldn't do significantly more
>   QA on the "monthly" ones anyway, what makes these images special?

Same questions here.  I'd happily roll along on the desktop for 2 years and
call the normal development cycle "support".

>You forgot the One True Reason for "Why Now?": I'm sure that it was
>never meant to be a Raring Ringtail, but always a Rolling Release! We
>couldn't do it at any other point in time.

*Much* better than the Sloppy Swish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taran_Killam#Killam.27s_character_Mokiki

>I'm looking forward to this. I'm sure there will be rough edges, but
>let's try this.

+1.

-Barry