Am Mittwoch, 12. September 2012, 11:53:21 schrieb Bryen M Yunashko:
The 1-year+Tumbleweed idea may just be the perfect solution for many people. It may also free us up as a Project to focus on promoting other benefits of openSUSE beyond just the distro. We do a pretty piss-poor job of promoting things like OBS, OpenQA, etc. They just don't get the limelight like distro does.
What's the reason for people to call for Tumbleweed etc.? IMO it's not that most people do really want/need a rolling distro but only some rolling projects, e.g. desktop environments, LibreOffice etc. If they bought new hardware they might want a rolling kernel until everything works, but most of the time people do not think about the base distro when it comes to rolling distros but the latest upstream release of Gnome, KDE, app x or y. I can only speak for KDE but I'm sure one way or another it can be applied to other projects as well. KDE has a repo for each major upstream release. This means that community members invest time on packaging and testing packages, resulting in the availability of upstream bugfix minor releases for openSUE KDE users. Are those fixes shipped to the user? Seldom, if at all. openSUSE wastes the effort community members have put into packaging upstream fixes instead of using it to the benefit of its users. Backports are possible in theory, yet do only happen seldom if at all in practice and if so, consume time that could be used elsewhere. Regarding KDE, backporting is doubling the work somebody else did already upstream. Packaging that backport is doubling the work a community member did already do on obs. The killer argument against shipping upstream bugfix releases is the regression myth. Again, I can only speak for KDE. There is certainly the possibility for regressions, but when was the last time a serious regression was introduced by an upstream bugfix release? A long, long time ago. And fixing that regression would taken only a fraction of the time that was spent on backporting and other double work. Plus, even if there is a regression, people can always revert to the oss version or if one enables obs to keep some versions of a package and not only one, the version before the regression. Not shipping upstream releases does often annoy upstream because people report bugs that have already been fixed or even worse, report issues that result from backporting and are thus very hard to understand by upstream, since those reporting often do not have a clue that they are not actually using version x.y but x.y+openSUSE "fixes". This wastes the time of upstream devs. So while in theory users would be better off with tons of backports and thus a stable distro, reality shows that there is no time for backports and openSUSE does not use the potential of the efforts done upstream and by community members. The real myth is that fixes are backported regularly and shipped to the user. Simply because openSUSE staff is busy with boosting all sorts of things but caring about Gnome, KDE etc. leaving alone spending time on a substantial contribution to those projects. So my idea is to ship openSUSE as base distro and integrate an official tool that allows the user to sign-up for upstream bugfix releases for projects such as Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice etc. I know that a community repo list exists, but it is not quite what is needed and not official. So to sum-up: Release a base distro every x months, save the (lack of) time for backporting, acknowledge the backporting myth and let openSUSE users benefit from upstream devs fixing bugs and the community's effort of packaging upstream bugfix releases. Sven -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org