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Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

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Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#21

Post by gtaylor »

onli wrote: post #20
jjcm wrote: post #17

I'll miss the bi-yearly fun with trying out a new release, and the name alliteration, but I think overall it's a smart move for Ubuntu. Does anyone have any reasons why they shouldn't move toward this? I'm curious.

There are two points against this: 1. They could underestimate the effort needed. Continously integrating the packages from sid and upstream and the own development effort, all without breaking for the user, without having targeted maintainers per package, is quite an effort. The mechanisms Gentoo has in place to manage this don't seem fitting for Ubuntu. 2. The half-year release circle gives users a sense of the pro…

The packaging is actually likely to be a lot easier, which is one of the big perks to this model. They only get stuck supporting the LTS releases, instead of having to backport fixes to every release in the last X years (was it 4?).

Something to keep in mind is that just because there is an updated package available for something, there is no need to get it updated on day 1. I suspect they've got a good feel for update frequency and priority on various packages. Worse case, they'll probably get it updated and more recent than the six month cycle (or 12 month if you run LTS).

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#22

Post by sp332 »

homeomorphic wrote: post #11
olenhad wrote: post #8

Yes Please! I'm sick of PPA-ing for updated packages.

Really? I've always felt that they give me the perfect balance: the distro itself is non-rolling, so breakages (possibly) happen at known intervals, yet PPAs let me "go rolling" for a subset of packages where I want the latest and am prepared to handle breakage at any time.

PPAs should be for cutting-edge stuff, not stuff that was stable 4 months ago and hasn't been updated in "main" yet.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#23

Post by gtaylor »

ohazi wrote: post #14
IgorPartola wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Debian can be faster or slower whilst Ubuntu LTS releases are on a schedule. For example I believe the currently stable Debian release includes Python 2.6 because 2.7 just missed it. I prefer Ubuntu's LTS releases to Debian because they are predictable.

Yes, I agree that ubuntu's time based releases are generally a better experience that debian's "whenever it's ready" stable releases. Debian's testing and unstable branches are rolling releases though, and those were the only alternatives I was actually considering.

Although, I'm not sure we can even look at the Debian when trying to predict what a rolling release Ubuntu would look like (even considering that they are "relatives").

The current difference in manpower and mind share is pretty big between these two related distros. Regardless of which one each of us may like better, Canonical has the manpower and mindshare to probably have a bit more success with this model. I really like Debian, so this is not a knock on them (I used Debian on servers for a very long time with great results).

Heck, we may even see Debian and Ubuntu working more closely once they take on this shared dev style (I know, I am pipedreaming, but hey...).

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#24

Post by gtaylor »

homeomorphic wrote: post #11
olenhad wrote: post #8

Yes Please! I'm sick of PPA-ing for updated packages.

Really? I've always felt that they give me the perfect balance: the distro itself is non-rolling, so breakages (possibly) happen at known intervals, yet PPAs let me "go rolling" for a subset of packages where I want the latest and am prepared to handle breakage at any time.

You really are at the mercy of the PPA maintainer, too. For some packages, the maintainer's interest may not be there for more than a release or two. That's a pain, when I could just be pulling from multiverse/universe/whatever it was called.

Obviously, this is less of a problem with the more popular PPAs (Postgres, for example).

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#25

Post by stormbrew »

I'd like to see them balance out dropping the interim releases with doing slightly more frequent LTE releases. Maybe every 1 or 1.5 years instead of 2. But obviously there might be manpower issues there. I just think they're abandoning a middle ground of stability that's still a very valuable space.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#26

Post by gizmo686 »

homeomorphic wrote: post #11
olenhad wrote: post #8

Yes Please! I'm sick of PPA-ing for updated packages.

Really? I've always felt that they give me the perfect balance: the distro itself is non-rolling, so breakages (possibly) happen at known intervals, yet PPAs let me "go rolling" for a subset of packages where I want the latest and am prepared to handle breakage at any time.

I wonder if there is a way to build this process more into the package management system. Maybe have to sets of repositories, a 'stable' repository that would behave like current, non-rolling repositories, and a 'rolling' repository that would get new versions of software once they've been tested. By default, software would install from the stable repositories, but you can do something like 'apt-get make_rolling python', and get the rolling release version of python. Such a system should then be able to handle dependencies that would need to be made rolling as well.

This clearly means more work for the maintainers, but only because the PPA method is so clearly a hack that there is no expectation that it must just work.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#27

Post by yogo »

gtaylor wrote: post #19
jjcm wrote: post #17

I'll miss the bi-yearly fun with trying out a new release, and the name alliteration, but I think overall it's a smart move for Ubuntu. Does anyone have any reasons why they shouldn't move toward this? I'm curious.

A lot of the counter argument is based on FUD and bad experiences with OTHER rolling release distros. I'm not sure we can look at Gentoo or Arch as examples of what Ubuntu would be aiming to do (and I say this as an Arch user). Within the proposal, it states that packages would be released when ready, and when stable. This doesn't mean that you are going to live on the bleeding edge like an Arch or Gentoo user may. Y…

I don't think it's so much on the bleeding edge in Arch as most people think and packages are usually upgraded in such a way so that dependencies don't cause problems in other packages (at least from my experience). The key has always been to always do a system upgrade and not upgrade individual packages, i.e. always run pacman -Syu or pacman -Syu . In four years I've never seen anything break (knock on wood) aside from a minor issue with a pcre upgrade sometime ago. That has just been my experience though, I run Arch on my desktop, laptop and about 10 vps servers.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#28

Post by yogo »

gtaylor wrote: post #19
jjcm wrote: post #17

I'll miss the bi-yearly fun with trying out a new release, and the name alliteration, but I think overall it's a smart move for Ubuntu. Does anyone have any reasons why they shouldn't move toward this? I'm curious.

A lot of the counter argument is based on FUD and bad experiences with OTHER rolling release distros. I'm not sure we can look at Gentoo or Arch as examples of what Ubuntu would be aiming to do (and I say this as an Arch user). Within the proposal, it states that packages would be released when ready, and when stable. This doesn't mean that you are going to live on the bleeding edge like an Arch or Gentoo user may. Y…

I don't think it's so much on the bleeding edge in Arch as most people think and packages are usually upgraded in such a way so that dependencies don't cause problems in other packages (at least from my experience). The key has always been to always do a system upgrade and not upgrade individual packages, i.e. always run pacman -Syu or pacman -Syu . In four years I've never seen anything break (knock on wood) aside from a minor issue with a pcre upgrade sometime ago. That has just been my experience though, I run Arch on my desktop, laptop and about 10 vps servers.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#29

Post by smogzer »

I can't use Ubuntu, I've tried countless times, the experience sucks. I'm trying mint, and i can't even access latest libraries, everything is old, no partition resizing during installation, lack of distro tools and lack of polish; in mageia everything is fresh and if it not the free support quickly updates them.

Mandriva had rolling releases with cooker and mageia has also with cauldron. Sorry for looking like a troll but i never got the hype with this ubuntu distro, i wish HN supported mageia more since distrowatch even reports mageia as the number two more popular distro.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#30

Post by Nux »

This could work, rolling-release + LTS. Archlinux seems to be doing quite well under the rolling-release auspice, so why not.

Of course, never in my experience has rolling-release ever worked in anything close to production environments - it's what killed FreeBSD in the data centre, however, if you're a techie with some time on your hands it could be cool.

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