Bug ID 954697
Summary Tumbleweed / rolling release is a one big lie
Classification openSUSE
Product openSUSE Tumbleweed
Version 2015*
Hardware All
OS Linux
Status NEW
Severity Critical
Priority P5 - None
Component Maintenance
Assignee bnc-team-screening@forge.provo.novell.com
Reporter virtuousfox@gmail.com
QA Contact qa-bugs@suse.de
Found By ---
Blocker ---

I'm one of naive fools who've heard the "news" about openSUSE team changing its
development model to build a binary rolling distribution which I recently
decided try out. Since for about one and a half years I've been trying to make
a universal (live & installable), capable of every but the most specific usage
case out-of-the-box, anti-censorship multi-linguistic desktop build of openSUSE
(https://github.com/v-fox/live_opensuse_hsf) the idea of not fiddling around
with legacy base packages was really alluring.

>From the news it seemed that OBS admins decided to make working and tested day
or week snapshots of all officialy supported bleeding edge Factory packages.
And it looked so. How could it be otherwise if all Tumbleweed repoes on on all
of OBS are built against something called Factory/snapshot with disabled
auto-building while there is Factory/standard constantly doing something ?
Well, apparently it damn is.
I've been getting errors about my configured Tumbleweed repositories not having
necessary dependencies for some packages built against those same repositories
which was... strange to say the least. And today I figured out why: all the
repoes on OBS are built against this "snapshots" repo while all the
"Tumbleweed" users are fed with "standard" repo while "snapshot", against which
everything is built, is inaccesible. So if you would try to use any repo beside
bleeding edge Factory YOU SYSTEM CAN BE BROKEN AT ANY TIME because nothing
prevents API difference between "snapshot" and "standard" !

Futhermore, I stumbled on this discussion piece:
http://opensuse.14.x6.nabble.com/Instructions-for-Tumbleweed-amp-Factory-Users-All-should-read-td5026312.html
Which confirmes that there is no such thing as Tumbleweed rolling release
distro, it's just a fancy, schmuck-charming name for Factory, now even more
broken.

So, for the benefit of openSUSE users craving for actual binary rolling distro
I propose:
1) For the people who came up with this: smack yourself with a harddrive if
you're sane or go to psychiatrist if not.
2) For the openSUSE infrastructure admins: get you shit together and
2-1) Make one, write up exact rules about how it operates or stop lying to the
world. If you'll choose neither, at least tell the truth that system would be
even more breakage-prone in case of adding _any_ repoes than a simple release
(at least API doesn't suddenly change at any moment on those and all packages
are accessible).
2-2) Either make "snapshot" accessible to users or build all "Factory" packages
against what is accessible to users. But the latter still will result in
breakage since repoes may publish their updates before Factory does.
2-3) Rename all "Tumbleweed" and "Factory" repoes in official projects (all
non-"home" ones) to one or another accordingly to the choice from 2-2.
2-4) If you would bother to make a rolling release from snapshots, make sure
that nothing is unbuilt in those snapshots before updating them.

PS: For the record: I use strict repo priority ordering and a tens of repoes so
the missing (and working) packages would be coming from somewhere in OBS
instead of counting on a good will and clear judgement of Factory maintainers
who don't provide access to all the bleeding edge OBS packages or maintain and
stabilise the subset they "allow" to Factory/"Tumbleweed" users.


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