On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 4:11 AM, David C. Rankin
On 12/06/2010 02:29 PM, John Andersen wrote:
avid:
In your use of Arch's rolling release have they ever slipped in packages that were clean and stable but hozed over other packages such that you were forced to roll back the upgrade, or use packages outside the rolling release to get up and running?
No,
Arch has got a pretty slick setup that catches 99.9% of the potential problems before newer packages from testing (factory equivalent) to the stable repos. Basically before a package gets moved, you have a 'sign-off' on both architectures from both the devs and the community.
Are new commits really tested against the existing package base, or are they simply letting the package management do its normal requires/provides analysis?
Yes, new commits *are* tested against the existing package base. That is the essence of a rolling release. For packages with multiple dependencies (eg. kernel/nvidia drivers, etc..), those 'coupled' packages are always updated as a group and once they are signed-off, then they get moved to stable. The tricky ones are the major changes to say hal or dbus, or the current python2->python3 change. They work the same way, but you know they are going to spend more time in testing (factory) before you see the roll out.
I have never had a bad update that Arch has put out experience a rollback. (now there have been a couple of package-1.2.next versions come out in quick succession :p
This is where things still occasionally go to hell in Debian Rolling Releases.
Arch has been rock solid on both its rolling-release and package handling. If opensuse goes this route, I hope they look at all the current rolling-release distros to find the best practices, but from my experience, they will want to take an extra-close look at Arch's rolling-release model.
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David, Greg KH is driving Tumbleweed. He has created a repo in OBS, but it is definitely at day one stage right now. https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=openSUSE%3ATumbleweed He is trying to get a kernel and git to compile and work for now. He is an expert kernel developer, but he is asking questions now on opensuse-packaging about how to get those packages to work right and for zypper to deploy them right. Once he has that, I suspect he will be looking to start adding packages. ie. Getting all of KDE 4.5 "should" be as simple as them being pushed from the kde 4.5 repo to the tumbleweed repo. Same for Samba, etc. Most of the major packages are already maintaining stable repos in addition to the 11.3 release repos. As to doing best-of-breed research, the topic is being discussed on opensuse-project. That's typically a relatively low volume mailinglist. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2010-11/msg00206.html You seem to have some good knowledge. If you want to impart it, you really need to join that mailing list and join the conversation. fyi: FOSDEM is coming up in a month and they have a distro-mini conference for sharing working knowledge about the distro process. Hopefully some openSUSE members will get a chance to discuss a rolling release with others there. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org