Lørdag den 9. maj 2015 19:24:52 skrev Richard Brown:
On 9 May 2015 at 15:14, Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@gmail.com> wrote:
If you dismiss the model of Tumbleweed based openSUSE releases on this background, you never gave the model a fair chance.
This is a fallacy. While we did rename Factory to Tumbleweed, we didn't revolutionise the development model for the Regular Release
In fact, we didn't change a thing
Things went into Factory, Factory had a snapshot, the release process kicked into gear, we pumped out a release
The model for 13.2 was no different than the development model for every release I've ever been involved in, so I think I can make conclusions based on the 13.2 release process
Technically it wasn't different, but procedurally it was - for starters people weren't used to only a 3 week window for testing and bugreporting. The time that openSUSE was branched off of Tumbleweed (effectively "feature freeze") wasn't known well ahead of time etc. And regardless, whatever problems 13.2 had, will only become worse by basing on SLE, and alienating the Tumbleweed contributors further from the stable openSUSE releases. We need to fix the issues, and not venture into some radical experiment, that I can't see succeeding.
We need a new Regular Release which either a) appeals to a new breed of contributors who will invigorate the Regular Releases or b) reduces the amount of work required so we can sustain producing regular releases alongside Tumbleweed as a rolling release - because frankly, right now, the status quo is not sustainable
Luckily, the availabilty of the SLE Sources, in my opinion, gives us an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
I fail to see how basing on SLE does either. It'll be much more work initially creating a distro based on SLE than on Tumbleweed, because of the lack of packages and the heavy need for backporting. With Tumbleweed, everything is already there, it just needs some polishing. The subsequent maintenance of the distro might be a bit less work with a SLE base, since SUSE will maintain the core of that. The new breed of contributors barely exist. Ask Debian Stable, CentOS and Evergreen.
We have other users who crave stability. Who pick openSUSE because we build stuff that works, not because we build stuff that changes all the time (and also works). These are the 'long tail' of people we know who are still using openSUSE 12.x, or openSUSE 13.1 and looking forward to an Evergreen release in the future.
Those users tend to have an extremely consumeristic approach and won't ever contribute a damn thing.
So, if we're not compromising on speed because we have Tumbleweed, why should we compromise on Stability for our Regular Release?
Because those are the two extremes that each appeal to very few people. Others have tried this before (Gentoo, Arch, Debian Unstable on the one side, CentOS and Debian Stable on the other). Most people don't want bleeding edge or enterprise grade stability. They want the middleground, i.e. a good balance of reasonable stability and reasonable (consumer) hardware support and fairly up-to-date applications.
The only 'flaw' in this plan, that I totally accept exists, is that for anyone who feels the current openSUSE regular release is 'perfect', then things might be changing for you in a negative way However, I'd ask those people, deep down, to identify the key reason they like the current openSUSE regular release.
Easy. Like I said above, you get decent stability, up-to-date software and hardware support. And you can easily install updated applications, without jeopardizing your stable base. Because it's pretty easy for Tumbleweed packagers to provide tons of backports for the stable releases with minimal extra work. The current situation is far from perfect, but it is fully fixable and full of potential (26 months lifetime would be very attractive, Tumbleweed improving means stable releases improve etc).
If you're primarily motivated because "every release I get all the new stuff", then please, use Tumbleweed, and if it's not perfect for you, help us make it better.
Tumbleweed will never be an option, no matter how good it becomes, it will still be rolling. Hence I will not use it and I can barely recommend it to anyone.
If you're motivated to use openSUSE because "I want a Linux distribution that just works", then please, help us with this new Regular Release, in order to make it perfect for you use cases.
Well, if you're going to sell this idea, you need to show me how it'll be significantly different than Debian Stable (apart from having a few great tools like yast, zypper, obs of course ;-). Because from what I gather from the discussion, assuming anyone would actually step up and build this distro, it'll have: * a release every 2-3 years * it'll have outdated hardware support compared to any mainstream distro * old software (primarily talking about applications and desktop environments here, the stuff that people actually "see") * it'll be very stable * the lifetime will be at "least 3 years" (i.e. not 5-6-7 years) So to me that sounds very much like Debian Stable. And people have already voted with their feet on that. There is very limited interest from users and developers alike - apart from the home/small office server niche. On the desktop it is virtually non-existent. If you could convince us that this distro could somehow achieve competitive hardware support of random newish cheapo laptops (wifi, power management etc.) and have applications that don't represent the state of the free software world of 2-4 years past - while maintaining hyper stability. Then maybe it could become interesting. But I can't see how that's possible. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org