Ubuntu discussing moving to LTS + rolling release model [LWN.net]

Ubuntu discussing moving to LTS + rolling release model

Posted Mar 3, 2013 8:18 UTC (Sun) by misc (subscriber, #73730)
In reply to: Ubuntu discussing moving to LTS + rolling release model by fdrs
Parent article: Ubuntu discussing moving to LTS + rolling release model

Yeah, everybody want to have up to date userspace, because there is some percentage of the user base who want it. Then, you also want newest kernel, because, there is new hardware to support. And of course, some new software requires new libraries, so you have to update them. So in the end, you end up updating almost everything, except glibc, and some low level plumbing.

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Ubuntu discussing moving to LTS + rolling release model

Posted Mar 3, 2013 17:44 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

That's not necessarily a bad thing. I think the fear of version number updates should be continuously re-evaluated to see if it makes sense, for a lot of software it doesn't. Software can have regular stable updates without breaking the world, browsers have been pretty successful and I'd argue that the kernel is fairly successful as well. Just because it's a "rolling release" doesn't mean that the version updates have to be uncontrolled, and what gets updated depends on how well the upstream community values stability.

If there aren't too many regressions and ABI stability then why not update and get the most bug-fixes rather than aggressively back-porting changes just to keep the number the same? Keeping ABI stability might also help protect you from dependency hell where everything is constantly being churned and broken, since it limits the amount of change you can do.