Ubuntu considers “huge” change that would end traditional release cycle (ars technica)

the other view of this is that the preasure of keeping things working all the time instead of tweaking things to work with a particular combination of things will make more people thing about and implement proper backwards compatibility.

The speed of development, stability, and performance of the Linux Kernel improved significantly when they changed from long upgrade cycles to short ones. They still have a testing phase, but when the changes are smaller, the testing is faster and more reliable.

Nobody is suggesting that any upstream release will be automatically rolled into a Ubuntu rolling release, but why should the upgrade of Firefox be held up by testing of a new version of Gnome? going to a rolling release would allow for the different apps that do not have dependencies on each other to get upgraded independently of each other. This would be a win.