

Ubuntu: Rolling release rumours wrong - ukdm
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Ubuntu-Rolling-release-rumours-wrong-1142040.html

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acabal
Too bad. PPAs are still too esoteric for normal use and waiting 6 months for
the latest versions which often include important usability and bug fixes is
way too long a time. I know some people think apt-get is the holy grail of
Linux software, and I agree it does have its pluses, but personally I think
it's just a hack for the shockingly bad state of Linux software installation,
which is also, I think, part of the rationale for 6-month releases.

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sp332
What do you think would be a better installation method than apt?

I use PPAs for Firefox nightlies and wine. It's very easy to set up - just
copy-and-paste from the website into Synaptic, and then it updates
automatically.

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acabal
Well that's kind of the point--there isn't a better way in Linux, but that
doesn't mean there isn't a better way to do it in general. Apt was designed I
think mainly as a workaround for Linux dependency hell, with the side effect
of it being convenient to install things. But the tradeoff is that all
software updates rely on a single central location--Canonical's servers
(besides PPAs). What if they go out of business, or the servers go down for
some reason one day? The second you step outside of the Apt walled garden
you're right back to the wild jungle of Linux dependency hell that makes it
nigh-impossible to install anything without hair-pulling compilation sessions,
in my experience.

And yes, PPAs have inched closer to user-friendliness with recent releases,
but they're not to the point where a non-terminal user can easily comprehend
the concept and then install their own.

Bringing this all back to the point--rolling releases--it's too difficult for
many to install PPAs, and even so, PPAs don't always exist for core components
that frequently have high-visibility regressions or bugs in new Ubuntu
releases. For example, in Maverick hibernate for my laptop is broken. It
freezes when it tries to hibernate. Where do I even start looking for a PPA
that solves this problem? I don't--instead, I hold my breath for 6 months and
don't use hibernate. That's not an acceptable solution.

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bergie
I guess the QA infrastructure isn't up to the task for rolling OS releases.
But it would make a lot of sense to separate the release cycles of the actual
OS and applications it supplies. With Maemo this has worked pretty well:

[http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/application_quality_assurance_in_l...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/application_quality_assurance_in_linux_distributions/)

(hmm, something wrong with the server. Here's the Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/application_quality_assurance_in_linux_distributions/))

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viraptor
> With Maemo this has worked pretty well

Seriously? Have you seen the comments on maemo's bugzilla saying "it's marked
as fixed, when is it going to be released" -> "we don't publish the release
dates beforehand" -> "but it still doesn't work for me, it's not fixed"...
etc.

No, I do not believe it works well. The main / extras split is unavoidable for
any new smartphone with apps repository. Maemo has a lot of problems because
of not doing more frequent rolling updates - I'd actually blame not being able
to type a small letter at the beginning of a sentence, for ~ _half a year_ as
a result of crap release cycle.

~~~
bergie
The issues you mention mostly deal with the platform itself, and that has
obviously been affected by the switch of focus from Maemo to MeeGo.

Agreed that the platform could benefit from rolling releases as well, but at
least the current approach allows that for applications. Something that most
Linux distributions don't do.

