[homeomorphic]

I'm sure the decision wasn't taken lightly, and I'm sure Canonical has concluded that an 18 month LTS + rolling makes the most sense for the project. As a user, I am a bit worried about rolling releases though. Maybe someone here can alleviate my worries?

As I see it, software has to change. The question for distros is just when? A rolling distro sees such changes continuously, and each package may in principle change at any point independently of any other package. Doesn't that mean that at any point, my workflow-critical programs may change their behavior or even stop working together? Sure, I can do upgrades more seldomly, but then I'm left without security updates. The main benefit I feel that non-rolling distros offer is predefined breakage points. I know that Ubuntu Quantal will work the way it works now until I upgrade to the next release. Even simply knowing in what way software is (and will remain) broken is useful.

Now of course, one can stay with LTS and get the same behavior. I guess I'm simply complaining because the 6 month cycle was perfect for me.

At any rate, I would guess that most users only really desire rolling behavior for a few (dozens?) of packages. Ubuntu has that nicely covered with PPAs (and also "special status" rolling packages like Firefox).

[jcastro]

> The question for distros is just when? A rolling distro sees such changes continuously, and each package may in principle change at any point independently of any other package.

The way it's set up now is there is a -proposed pocket where major transitions are being held, so the old notion of having a library upgrade breaking $foo applications doesn't really happen anymore. From my view, I've been running 13.04 everyday and about half way through the development cycle it was better than 12.10. EDIT: There is also a ton of active QA happening in Ubuntu now, we have nice things we never had before like daily builds firing off and having tests run, prerelease pocket test, and (soonish) phased updates.

As far as what you're going to do when your user apps upgrade, you've been doing it on Firefox/Chrome/your phone for ages now, it's about time our desktops caught up!

[dizzystar]

>>> As a user, I am a bit worried about rolling releases though. Maybe someone here can alleviate my worries?

As an Arch Linux user, I've had no problems with rolling releases. I know that's not much to go on, but I think with a large known company running the show, there is going to be some responsibility here.

Hopefully others can chime in.

[YokoZar]

The decision hasn't been made yet. Canonical's CTO may have decided he likes it, but the Ubuntu project hasn't yet given it a pass.

If you've got workflow-critical programs you don't want updating, use the LTS release. That's what it's for.

[pyre]

I think the real issue is when infrastructure things move.

How would the move to PulseAudio have worked in a rolling release? Would someone with a new install end up with PulseAudio, but someone with an existing install, would just never have it installed unless they knew what it was and started poking around for it?

The same for the transition to using evdev for (e.g.) mouse-handling in X.org rather than defining things in xorg.conf.

I know that Debian has lived through these transitions, but my impression was that the packages were setup in a way that allowed people to keep the old config, or move to the new one. That said, it seems like these issues could be more complex than a 'human being' (Ubuntu's target market) would be able to decipher.

[YokoZar]

It's not even clear that the rolling release will be intended for non-enthusiasts at this point, however as a matter of policy you can be pretty sure that any update applied to the rolling release will need to be tested against users as old as the last LTS.

That means the same sort of transition of config files and libraries that occur on release upgrade would just happen during a normal package install, which is pretty much how it works anyway (a release upgrade isn't much more than a giant group of packages being upgraded together -- all this logic is stored in the packages themselves).

[pyre]

I get the difference between a release upgrade and a rolling release schedule. My point was that when you are creating a release, you can say "this is the point where this change happens." With a rolling release, will a "apt-get upgrade" transition me? What if this was unexpected? What if this breaks my config?

For most normal upgrades this doesn't matter because the applications are usually fairly insular, but when you get into integrated systems like Desktop Environments it's different. Especially when Ubuntu is making a number of UI/etc changes to the desktop. It would be a bit surprising to have UI parts shift around. When you do a release upgrade, you know that there are going to be some major changes, and there are ChangeLog/notes on the release itself to tell you what major changes there are.

[homeomorphic]

> If you've got workflow-critical programs you don't want updating, use the LTS release. That's what it's for.

I know. And it could be that I'm just grumpy that I'm losing the great thing Ubuntu gave me: essentially 6 months of frozen Debian Unstable.

Now we might get 18 months of frozen Unstable along with a Testing/Unstable-like rolling thing. Except for the regular-guy-friendly installer, what will Ubuntu really add over Debian anymore then?

What's kept me on Ubuntu for 6 years was that it gave me exactly what I wanted: relatively frequent, but frozen snapshots of Sid! But then again, if I'm in a small minority thinking like this, I won't complain :-)