OpenSUSE To Offer a Rolling Release Repository 72
dkd903 writes "While the rumors of Ubuntu moving to a rolling release have been brought to a halt, another major Linux distribution is looking to provide a rolling release. In a message to the opensuse-project mailing list, openSUSE developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a new project – openSUSE Tumbleweed. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will provide a rolling release for those openSUSE users who wishes to have a rolling release. It will essentially be a repo containing the latest stable versions of the applications."
Excellent idea (Score:5, Interesting)
What I like about rolling releases is you get to deal with application incompatabilities one at a time as they come up, rather than having to spend a week or few all at once when upgrading a distro.
I think it's also probably better for security, as you get the latest patches for the software. (I know the security patches get applied to downlevel releases as well by distributors, but that seems so cumbersome compared to following the application's software releases.)
Re:What's the fascination with "rolling releases"? (Score:3, Interesting)
> Support for new hardware.
Removal of old, but still used hardware.
> New features.
More unneeded and unwanted API changes.
> Easier to contribute to development.
Harder to develop own applications for a faster movin target.
> Less obsolete versions of software.
More forced upgrades, more forced training costs, less bug fixes for older, but mission critical versions.
> No need to wait months or years to see stable released improvements on your system.
No way to avoid bad "improvements".
All in all, for commercial usage and development, this makes the situation even less predicatble and manageable than it is now. The target now moves even faster.
As somebody else already said, it is crucial for the Linux ecosystem to stop bundling applications and the base systems, and to unpredictably couple application updates to system updates. This unpredictability and instability is killing Linux in the enterprise. It needs a stable, very stable base companies can develop for without fear that they'll obsolete in 5 years or having to adapt to wild unpredictable API changes every 6 months.
Linux software may be "stable" in terems of performance, but it is the exact opposite in terms of development and long term planing, and this is killing it in the industry.