reflecting on first UDS session on "rolling releases"

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Allison

On 06/03/2013 01:49, Allison Randal wrote:
> There were a few things that concerned me in today's session on cadence
> of rolling releases:

Sad not to have made it, I had to be out at that moment. Thanks for the 
summary!

> 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.

I think that it would be a good idea to be armed with more information 
before making big decisions like this, information that is out there but 
possibly not properly harvested yet. Like, "Why is two years between 
releases too long?". From my experience with a wide selection of 
different kind of users, it comes down to this:

  * Hardware enablement
   * New Linux kernel
   * New Xorg (and friends) stack
  * Latest software
   * Desktop environment
   * Firefox/Thunderbird
   * LibreOffice
   * ... and some other popular ones but the list isn't that long

As far as I understand, a really good effort is already put into the 
hardware enablement part in LTS. So hypothetically, if a dozen or so 
packages were well updated and available somewhere for LTS, what would 
be the gap that's left for users to find it useful and stick with it?

> 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.

Sure this is anecdotal, but it covers 100+ 'normal' end users I've come 
across, but for a large number of them, they /fear/ updates. Not like a 
casual developer fear of "oh, this might blow up and I might have to fix 
it", but a more primal, real level of fear of "Oh f**k. This might not 
work and then I'm without my computer and then I'm totally screwed and I 
won't know what to do!" kind of fear.

Also, is a monthly release intended to be less work than a 6-monthly 
release? Because last I checked there wasn't enough manpower to pull off 
a 6 month release without any very harsh bugs.

Basically, I agree that a rolling model for end users is fiction at this 
stage, but I'm willing to trust the people coming up with the plan and 
if they have some brilliant ideas around it then I'll certainly back 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.

+1

> 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.)

IMHO it should really be worked on as "a proposal" rather than something 
"that's happening now". Some people have asked me what I think of "the 
rolling release proposal", but afaik there isn't really any real 
proposal yet, it's all being actively worked on. It's hard to agree or 
disagree with something that doesn't really exist yet. At this stage 
it's all really just discussion and I think it's more healthy to assume 
that things will continue working as they did before until the plan is 
more formalized, rather than everyone jumping to their own conclusions 
and working in different directions which would probably very negatively 
affect a 13.04 release, if it should happen (which does indeed look more 
and more unlikely).

But that's just me, I like to think that I'm reasonable and pragmatic, 
but perhaps I'm just getting old and too guarded.

-Jonathan