Ubuntu To Turn Into A Rolling-Release Distribution?

[RagingDragon]

Binary distros with rolling releases

There are atleast two well known and regarded binary distributions with rolling releases: Arch and Slackware.

[ernstp]

Yey, this is what I always wanted! Won't need 20 ppa's anymore. :-)

Still this should be combined with some kind of LTS platform every now and then.

[NomadDemon]

mixed feeling about rolling edition

you want wayland.. without automated help, its impossible to make it work good

maybe rolling edition fork? or set in update center? not forcing to use one of this two

[chaos386]

Imagine Glibc is upgraded and you have 1000 packages currently installed in your system. A lot of packages from the tree must be rebuilt or will break with segfaults!

So how come I don't have to re-download those 1000 packages whenever there's a bugfix release to Glibc?

[mendieta]

And yes I'm aware that strictly speaking, there is support for a nice ol' sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude full-upgrade but I've seen it go wrong too many times on Kubuntu to trust that process for updating to a new Kubuntu release.

Works here (not even from the command line, but from the upgrade GUI) most of the time. This is in 2 netbooks, a desktop and a laptop, all at home. I only had issues ocassionally, once with the ATI binary drivers not working after the upgrade, and recently with a grub bug whereas it wrote to the wrong partition. In both cases I fixed it, but a newbie would have been stuck. So, the success rate has been really high

It would still be great to have a way to only keep apps up to date, assuming your kernel/graphics stack all do what you need.

[dalingrin]

This would be really great.
Anyone who has used Arch linux without the Test repo knows that it easily as stable as Ubuntu.

[brent]

I think there are some plans already to offer updated versions of important desktop applications (say, Firefox or OpenOffice) mid-release. This is a very useful decis, but only if the basis of the distribution is left unchanged as much as possible. IMO a full, system-wide rolling release is in general a bad idea.

[V!NCENT]

Heh, Canonical|Mark is playing Microsoft

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html

They will win some more marketshare with this. This is the sole reason Microsoft ever came to dominance, but I doubt it will work for Ubuntu...

[brent]

This is a very useful decis

Decision. Screw that one minute limit.

[crazycheese]

So how come I don't have to re-download those 1000 packages whenever there's a bugfix release to Glibc?

It depends on case. Sometimes its just changes to the code, sometimes changes to compile or link logic. Most of the time its not required, yet most of the time minor versions are not kept in gentoo as well.