On 2 October 2010 14:50, Jérôme Martin <[email protected]> wrote: > Le vendredi 1 octobre 2010, Olivier Méjean a écrit : >> Le vendredi 1 octobre 2010 08:51:34, atilla ontas a écrit : > >> > What's your opinion? >> >> What about a rolling distribution ? As an user (just plain user) i do not >> think that installing a distribution is a goal, just a mean to use my >> computer, so i wish i could not spend time installing a distribution every >> 6 months or every year. >> > > My opinion is nearly the same: what is the need to provide a new version each > 6 months? The marketing point of view is not a valid answer since we do not > need to satsify shareholders or follow the market. >
Yes, but you have a distro to maintain, a reputation to uphold... > So when a new version is needed? My point of view is that a new version is > needed when a big change will occur for exemple a new major release of KDE or > gnome, Xorg, perl, python, jdk, ... > > We need to change our view. Actually, the date of the release is decide and > the deciders (maketting, CEO, CTO, ?) choose which softwares will be include. > I propose to look at release date of the main softwares and decide when a new > version will be proposed. > Hmm, no, IINM, that would be the release engineers job. > For smaller software, we do not need to wait for a new version of the distro. > Just provide it as we do with the backport repository. New version => new features + new bugs; anyone who ran cooker for a good amount of time have witnessed this fact.... > > And no, rolling distro does mean use cauldron, since the system is not > supposed to work properly and where critical breakage can appear. > > Ah, yes, so you want a rolling release, just like Cauldron will be, but that's not broken; now how should one go about guaranteeing that this will actually work out OK? A rolling distro means double work for the devs and packagers as a new version may just introduce new bugs too, now they don't provide the new versions in a controlled development release where you're warned that "this is a development release not suitable for day-to-day production machines", or in a "unsupported backports" repo, no, it'll just go to the stable release too..... Now don't only think about a Mageia installation on a personal computer, where even if the system is totally hosed you can easily do a new install or restore a backup (then update to latest), but you also have to bear in mind users who have servers doing all sorts of jobs, they want stability over new-shiny-versions; the same goes for school/university labs... etc. -- Ahmad Samir
