4 ms·

Seems like a step forward in solving the "stale versus reliable" conundrum. Over the years I've repeatedly been irked by how stale the package repositories are

Seems like a step forward in solving the "stale versus reliable" conundrum. Over the years I've repeatedly been irked by how stale the package repositories are in some distros. At the fresh end of the spectrum, I used Gentoo for a while, and I do like many things about Gentoo, but I came to the conclusion that it is essentially impossible to QA Gentoo. Plus, falling behind in Gentoo opens you to a world of hurt trying to update. So I'll probably try Tumbleweed. I think the acid test will be how hard it is to update a few-months old installation. Testing each release is one thing -- testing all variations of update paths, again, leads to combinatorial explosion. Perhaps they have an update mechanism that deals with migration issues -- I'd like to understand how they approach that problem.

rbrownsuse 11y ago
zypper takes care of most of that for us - it really is an exceptional package manager We have some tests in openQA that keep an eye on upgrades, as well as some users who like to stagger their Tumbleweed updates for some weeks. I think the record I heard was like 3 months (and our gcc5 migration happened during those months), and then they upgraded with no problem
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  3 months? That's peanuts. Having too many Arch boxes, back in '12/'13 I had one that was 9 months behind, with the big filesystem movearound and sysvinit->systemd change happening in that period. It took a couple of hours of work, but the upgrade went through fine in the end. I'd suggest you do automated testing of at least 6 month old system upgrades. Because users are going to do it, and much complaining will ensue when it breaks their system.
  - rbrownsuse 11y ago
    We do automated testing from our 'traditional' distributions, including versions that existed BEFORE Tumbleweed in it's current form..like 13.1, 12.3, etc.. So in that case, we're going back years ;)

rbrownsuse 11y ago

zypper takes care of most of that for us - it really is an exceptional package manager We have some tests in openQA that keep an eye on upgrades, as well as some users who like to stagger their Tumbleweed updates for some weeks. I think the record I heard was like 3 months (and our gcc5 migration happened during those months), and then they upgraded with no problem

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
3 months? That's peanuts. Having too many Arch boxes, back in '12/'13 I had one that was 9 months behind, with the big filesystem movearound and sysvinit->systemd change happening in that period. It took a couple of hours of work, but the upgrade went through fine in the end. I'd suggest you do automated testing of at least 6 month old system upgrades. Because users are going to do it, and much complaining will ensue when it breaks their system.
- rbrownsuse 11y ago
  We do automated testing from our 'traditional' distributions, including versions that existed BEFORE Tumbleweed in it's current form..like 13.1, 12.3, etc.. So in that case, we're going back years ;)