On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Richard Brown
On 19 October 2015 at 15:01, jcsl
wrote: Hi.
Currently we have repositories with the latest versions of desktops and some applications (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, ...) Will they be available for Leap too?
Greetings.
Hi,
I do not want to speak for the individual maintainers for those individual repositories -
Whether or not they want to make repositories for that purpose is a decision for them to make. I'm about to express below my opinion, but ultimately, it's up to our maintainers, and they're fully within their right to ignore everything I say now.. but personally speaking, if I was in their shoes, I would _not_ bother with 'latest version' repos for Leap.
We have Tumbleweed for the 'latest of everything' use case. It's a LOT easier for us to maintain a fully rolling release, than trying to keep a constantly moving software stack (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla) working ontop of a static base.
Most of the time, when something goes wrong, it's often easily fixed by updating to the latest things from upstream or updating something somewhere else in the stack to fix the integration issues.
And if it's easier for us to maintain (and test - Tumbleweed has openQA, something which none of those projects currently do) it's less likely to break for our users..
Lots of work has gone into Leap to make it a STABLE distribution. It's taken us months to put it together and make it work right. A lot of that work has been integrating the chosen versions of all those software stacks so it can act as a stable, curated, consistent, operating system, which should serve everyone who downloads it well until at least 42.2 comes out a year from now.
Such stuff doesn't happen overnight, has required lots of work and lots of testing from lots of different angles. No addon repository is going to have that level of scrutiny and effort.
Furthermore, taking individual software stacks, and piling them ontop of a static base, is a lot more work for our maintainers to do, and it doesn't take much for people to be able to make very horrific combinations that would just never work. Just look at the 'old Tumbleweed' model (Tumbleweed from before Nov 2014) - that was our old regular releases, with an addon repository with a selection of new packages (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Kernel) maintained and curated by a renowned kernel developer, but even then it broke a lot, because it's frankly harder to build something that works, and stays working, that way.
More integration points, more ways stuff can go wrong, especially when still trying to do it at a pace that follows the upstream projects, but that unmoving base makes it harder to find solutions to make it right.
So, my hope would be that we start moving away from that model.
While addon repos have indeed been dodgy regarding stability, they have been very valuable, so your assessment seems quite nearsighted. Yes, it's difficult to make them hold to the same standards as stable distributions. But unlike rolling distributions, you don't have to risk your whole system (and time) to update some component you absolutely need. Furthermore, you won't know you need the addon repo until after you installed and have been working with the distribution for a while. Say you install Leap, and it's fine because at that point everything's the latest or close enough. Let a year pass, and while you got all the security updates, you start noticing that this annoying little bug in software X just became a showstopper for you, and see that a newer version has it fixed. Software X is a leaf package, so you think: I should just update it, but yeah, it depends on libY and libZ. Still, nothing else uses libY, and the libZ update is binarily backwards compatible, so you update, and live happily ever after. Sure, it's tricky, you can actually break things. But the nature of the breakage is far more limited and predictable than in the case of tumbleweed's "zypper dup", which simply by following the mailing list can be scary to watch if you actually depend on your computer for your livelihood. Add to that the fact that people will simply wash their hands if you use TW and don't dup (updating a single package? you're on your own), and you can start to appreciate the value of addon repos. So, I agree, addon repos for core components (say Mesa) would probably be too much effort to be worth it. But that's not something you can or should generalize. Leaf packages should be just fine. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org