On Sunday 23 September 2012 11:11:57 Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Wednesday 2012-09-12 19:53, Nelson Marques wrote:
2012/9/12 Jos Poortvliet <jos@opensuse.org>:
On Wednesday 12 September 2012 15:53:57 Nelson Marques wrote:
Sorry for trolling... But please consider making only one release per year... 9 months is odd enough... and resource wise it sounds like it makes things harder. With OBS backing up, people would still be able to update or install extra repos easilly.
I don't think it's trolling, I think it's a legitimate idea and it has been brought up before.
My idea is that people who want a stable desktop don't want to do upgrades often... This means that even 1 year might be too low, but far more acceptable than 6 months or 9 months. This will also reinforce the identity of openSUSE around stability.
You are mixing stability with upgrades, which is a shortsighted thing to assume I think. Upgrades do not automatically mean loss of stability.
Stability of 12.1 was, you could say, "impacted" by the introduction of 12.1. That took some more testing, and bug reporting.
I don't understand the sentence above.
Stability of 12.2 was only impacted for me by one Xfce bug that I hit and then circumvented as it was a one-time occurrence.
On the other hand, having to do an upgrade incurs other costs: I need to plan upgrades somewhat because I have openSUSE-derived packages (i.e. modifications to aaa_base, coreutils, etc.) that need rebasing for a new release, hence I don't want to do that too often.
Agreed that upgrades don't have to result in instability - but they DO invariably mean change. And change, as you argue, is the bad thing (to some extend). A longer release cycle brings less change (or, with OBS, only change where the user wants it). In any case. Point still stands: many users would appreciate a slower release cycle, for various reasons. It would also probably help release management as we could introduce longer freeze periods. It might make development more boring and will result in a more outdated openSUSE - but we can counter that probably with OBS fu. /Jos