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OpenSUSE Chairman Richard Brown: Regular Releases Are Wrong, Roll for Your Life

• magicalhippo 6y ago
  At work we've been moving towards a kind of rolling release scheme as well. We're almost there, as we have a launcher that allows users to try out newer versions as well as having access to older versions. In essence you can run the previous, current and next major versions, and for each of those we have the latest 5 builds. We make a new major version typically every month. This means that a lot of bugs can be worked around by simply running an older build or major version. Show-stoppers thus become inconvenient instead. Also it's easier to tell customers their super important feature will come in the next release in a month, rather than having the feature be backported, avoiding the "partial slow" scheme mentioned in the talk. The main issue here is the database, which of course can't be rolled back easily. So we don't, and write our code with that in mind. This has been a great change from when customers would stick on a version for over a year at a time. Upgrading often meant lots of time spent by support for assisting with testing, and by the time the testing was done (not a high priority with the customers) the version that was deemed ready was already hopelessly out of date.