[Mageia-dev] Release cycles proposals, and discussion

[Maarten Vanraes]

Op dinsdag 14 juni 2011 00:08:56 schreef David W. Hodgins:
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:28:04 -0400, Renaud MICHEL 
<r.h.michel+mageia at gmail.com> 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.

I have a similar machine, but updated through the applet, which means it only 
takes about 1hour and you can work in the main time and reboot when you want. 
i don't understand why users would be expressly wanting rolling release when 
you don't need to reinstall, or "upgrade" in a traditional sense at all...

> 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