On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:28:04 -0400, Renaud MICHEL <[email protected]>
wrote:
On lundi 13 juin 2011 at 23:06, Thorsten van Lil wrote :
A rolling release has following advantages:
1. the distribution is always up to date (also hardware support)
2. no re-install over and over again
I don't get it why people think a re-install is necessary.
My current computer was installed with mandriva 2007 (don't remember if it
was .0 or .1), it is now mageia 1 and has been updated to all intermediary
mdv releases.
My currently running install started as Mdv 2009.1, updated via urpmi to
2010.2, then converted to Mageia cauldron during beta 1.
With a little over 4400 packages, the upgrade from one release to the next
takes over 8 hours, on this single core Celeron processor, so even though
it's not an actual re-install, it still feels like one. /usr alone is 13GB.
One possibly annoying part about that, is that there are many rpm packages
where the only obvious change is the version. I understand that for many
of the packages, they have to be rebuilt due to perl/python/glib version
changes, but anyone who doesn't know that will see what seems like a lot
of unneeded updates.
One con of a rolling release has been demonstrated by Cauldron over the last
few days. With the perl/gnome updates, it takes a few days for all of the
needed packages to get built. For a couple of days, running urpmi with
--auto-select wanted to remove most of gnome. I waited till the needed
packages were available, whereas a less technical user may have ended up
removing key parts of their desktop manager.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
