[arch-general] On rolling release system and its benefits.

[Aaron Griffin]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Ali H. Caliskan
> <ali.h.caliskan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been using Arch since few months and I enjoy using it everyday that
>> goes by. However, during that time, while helping Arch users on the forum,
>> I've encountered some issues concerning upgrades and broken packages. I
>> personally think Arch is stable and well maintained compared to other big
>> distros, but that's a rolling release stability, that lasts only few days or
>> weeks. What I would like Arch developers is to extend the rolling release
>> into a snapshot release of an entire list of officially maintained packages,
>> comprising both core and extra branches. At least it would be a great way of
>> using Arch for 5 to 6 moths and then upgrade to a next snapshot release. I'm
>> not talking about stable releases, just a snapshot of a rolling state.
>> Snapshot releases does also benefit the natural need of closing bugs. Not to
>> mention, it does make it easy to maintain orphaned packages as well.
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Ali
>>
>
> Hi, it has been discussed many times in the past. Bottom line is, if
> you want to do that go ahead, the developers wont help you. Meaning
> this will not be an official project.
> See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Stable for info
> about the last time this was attempted.
> & good luck

Man, every few months this used to come up... it's been a while for this one.

Won't happen. Nope. Nada.

Go ahead and try, there's lots of ideas. Hell, it's real easy, you
don't even have to build packages. Just mirror the Arch repos, figure
out some metrics defining what is "stable", and then snapshot those
packages. Continue mirroring until you find another point in time that
is "stable" and snapshot again.

Seems easy to me. The fact is, no one really cares. Yes, software will
break. Software is complicated. Something will always go wrong.

The people who get so out of shape about some apps being broken (what
is it this time? Xorg doesn't work with my keyboard! rollback!
rollback!) are the same people not willing to help themselves. If
someone spent 10 minutes trying to resolve their problems, they'd
actually resolve them. The same people wanting to do
snapshot/stable/whatever releases are the same people who usually
don't spend a small amount of time fixing their own issues... where do
you think they'll find the time to maintain a whole distro?

So, there you go.
Official position: Not gonna happen.
Wiki link to existing ideas:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Stable
Implementation examples: See my first large paragraph

Go ahead. It's all there for ya. I, for one, would love to see someone do this.