reflecting on first UDS session on "rolling releases"

[Allison Randal]

There were a few things that concerned me in today's session on cadence
of rolling releases:

http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1303/meeting/21683/community-1303-rolling-release/

But, the biggest was at the very end when System76 said that two years
is too long between releases for their customers, but that they were
willing to at least *try* the new rolling releases. The reply was that
the rolling releases weren't expected to be stable enough to deliver to
customers. This surprised me, since "stability" is exactly the purpose
of rolling releases.

If the "rolling releases" really aren't intended for end-users, then we
should just drop the fiction, say the change is from a 6-month cadence
to a 2-year cadence, and be done with it.

Yes, it has all the problems we've come to know-and-hate with stale
applications. So, either allow SRU exceptions for more applications like
we do for Firefox, or start really supporting Backports for the LTS.

It's a waste of everyone's time and effort to rework the whole project
around talk of "rolling releases" when it's really just the same old
development release on a slower schedule. (Remember how we used to call
monthly images alphas and betas? That was ages ago, like 4 whole months.)

Allison