Proposal: Rolling Release

[Casey Dahlin]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> And you may need both old and new versions present while you perform 
>> the operations an upgrade requires.  So generic package-magic would 
>> involve being able to install the new version without removing the 
>> old so you have a chance to do the interactive parts before it is too 
>> late.
>
> Again, this is something upstream project should do. GTK and gstreamer 
> for example does make this easy.
>
> http://www106.pair.com/rhp/parallel.html
>
> Working around this at the packaging level is always going to require 
> elaborate hacks. OpenSUSE did this for shipping KDE 3 and KDE 4 in 
> parallel but other distributions refused.
The article you link to is about a subtly different problem: having two 
versions independently usable by the user. For Les's scenario we just 
need the file sets of both packages available. They aren't separate 
entities to the user. Also, Les's scenario is more granular: You can 
install gstreamer-0.8 and gstreamer-0.10 at the same time, but not 
gstreamer-0.10.1 and gstreamer-0.10.2. Requiring upstream to rename 
their packages even for bugfix releases with no abi effect is hell on 
them and on the users of their libraries.

There's been talk of snapshots and rollbacks, but I'd like to see 
discussion of some of the more exotic filesystem features. Btrfs is 
supposed to support transactions, which is a much more correct way of 
dealing with this sort of thing.

--CJD