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Greg KH Favors Rolling Release Distros

Posted by timothy on from the as-long-as-the-hill-is-gentle dept.

jones_supa writes In an interesting Google+ post, the lieutenant Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman mentions him fully moving to rolling-release Linux distributions: 'Finally retired my last 'traditional' Linux distro box yesterday, it's all 'rolling-release' Linux systems for me. Feels good. And to preempt the ask, it's Arch Linux almost everywhere (laptop, workstation, cloud servers), CoreOS (cloud server), and Gentoo for the remaining few (laptop, server under my desk).' What's your experience? Would in the current situation a rolling-release operating system indeed be the optimal choice?

96 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Uh by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't bother clicking the link. The *entire* post is contained in the summary.

    --
    Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
    1. Re:Uh by AikonMGB · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shit, I accidentally RTFA then =(

    2. Re:Uh by Jose · · Score: 4, Funny

      hah, what a newb.

      I really wish Greg would have told us which distro he is using though.

      --
      The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
  2. So much for stability and uptimes... by TWX · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was an era, probably inherited from the big-iron computing model, where we strived for stability and long uptimes. We didn't install things that we didn't need (with the exception of Fortune perhaps) and locked-down the box at the network stack. Granted, it required a lot of knowledge at the beginning to make sure that the box was indeed secure, but we were proud of setting up a good, usable box that didn't need a lot of maintenance after the fact.

    I guess that era is now gone, with rapid-release and lots of little things constantly needing the system to restart.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Informative

      Some of us still work in environments where constant restarts are strictly not allowed, and software which expects to be on a constant release cycle is shunned.

      We had a vendor once, who wrote a component for a large enterprise system ... they released builds pretty much weekly and thought that was grand.

      We filed a bug once, and they said "we don't support that version because it's a month old, and therefore 4 versions out of date, you need to upgrade". We said "you'll be hearing from our lawyers because we don't take a prod outage every week just for you idiots". Needless to say, they quickly realized they were going to lose that fight.

      Sorry, we need a lot more stability, and we don't care if you think you're on an agile cycle. It takes around two months to promote something through to Production ... we simply don't care that you want to build weekly.

      Not all places (specifically most regulated industries) have the ability to have stuff constantly changing underneath them, and they certainly haven't got the patience for some company who thinks a product lifecycle is measured in weeks.

      Continuous releases often have the effect of making your customers your beta testers. And we can't do that for you.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by jythie · · Score: 2

      Over the last decade or two, both developers and users have simply become to a certain, rather low, level of stability being normal. The economic prize tends to go to companies that play fast and lose, more conservatives ones that are careful end up not being 'sexy' enough and wither.

    3. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by jythie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While many consider it gouging, this is why I like support contracts. A nice signed piece of paper saying 'yes, we WILL support the version you are using even if our active development moves on'.

    4. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by armanox · · Score: 1

      I don't think the OP was talking about his laptop.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    5. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by TWX · · Score: 1

      Yet, those rapid release cycle groups are becoming problematic. Case in point, Instructure Canvas. Three week release cycle, significant dependency on third-party repositories and on patches to stock components, and yet doesn't support the current-stable OS, relying on an old-stable. Also takes 90+ hours a week just to keep it running properly.

      Instructure is trying to get people to use Instructure's cloud hosting, not to use a self-hosted model. I expect that contributes to their customers' migration to the Instructure-hosted version even at $10/student.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    6. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Using separate apps and libraries which have strict and unavoidable dependencies between them isn't "modularity".

      Modularity requires those components to be very loosely coupled.

      For example, GNOME consists of many separate libraries, apps, and scripts, but it isn't modular. Installing just one small GNOME app means you have to pull in tons of libraries and other apps, because they are tightly coupled.

      Systemd is similar to GNOME. It's an all-or-nothing situation, which obviously isn't modular.

      Traditional UNIX software generally is modular. I can easily change my shell, for example, without affecting the other software on the system. I can even install a different C compiler, and none of the other software on the system would even be aware of the change. That's true modularity.

    7. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by jythie · · Score: 1

      One of the things that really ends up concerning me is that dependency tree and how it can quickly branch off in all sorts of unexpected directions as packages bring each other in.

      One thing I really loathed about using maven in a production environment was the younger developers looking at the fact you could set the version numbers you wanted as a panacea against needing to worry about what an update will do.

    8. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      don't forget that they're adding a bootloader now too... I can just see it now:
      systemd bug report:
      Missing kitchen sink.

      Anyways, I'd been planning to move away from Ubuntu for some time, and went as far as experimenting with Fedora Core 20/1, and HAD been toying with the idea of moving to arch.

      I ended up installing arch on a new a10-7850k build as I wanted to toy around with HSA and since support is really just rolling out the last few months, I needed something a little more bleeding edge than the "traditional" distros. All I have to say is that arch was a PITA to setup(1st time only hopefully) and brought back nightmares of days long gone by, bootstrapping gcc, re-compiling kernel, building X11, circular dep hell in Redhat, building custom kernels again later, etc. before I finally threw up my hands and moved on as I was wasting too much time building, customizing, and trying to fix borked dep systems. Still ran yellowdog on ppc systems(pretty much only choice other than debian IIRC) and tried opensuse(actually flirted with this several times I remember when they used to sell opensuse retail with a massive(and useful) tome of documentation(this was back in the fuzzy time of tldp just starting and dox just kind of vague and fuzzy if there were any)), and Debian on x86 machines until Ubuntu came around, but the last few years Ubuntu has been moving off somewhere that I don't want to go for the ride with it -> looking around at other distros, tries linux mint and some others(Ubuntu derived) as well.

      I also tried the I guess arch derived "distro" that tries to tack on a GUI installer, but that thing did NOT like my system at all, so instead of wasting time, I went and installed arch the PITA way that it's meant to be installed. Christ! It's worse than installing(CLI) *BSD. ...and for the guys that need a long term constant/consistent OS that's what the LTS traditional distros are for. The rest of us are probably really better served by the roilling distros, or at least to an extent, or perhaps one of the *BSDs.

    9. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by swb · · Score: 1

      And if you're lucky, the people you deal with are all seasoned veterans with the version you want support on, know all the fixes and troubleshooting info.

      If you're not lucky, the people providing support for your version are clueless newbies who've never seen your version in active production and are relying on the internal KB and decision trees they stumbled across on an old file server.

      And you could blame the vendor for being douche bags and that might be true, but then again, maybe the seasoned veterans want to work on the current release or need to be fed new and interesting stuff in order for the vendor to keep anyone competent in their support department. Which then makes the vendor non-douchy at least to some of their employees while still being frustrating to their customers.

    10. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      How come every systemd update on Debian makes the next system shutdown a collection of random things if the systemd was so modular and allowed online updates? After systemd update, the power button may not bring the confirmation dialog (to select from hibernate, restart or shutdown) but it initiates shutdown, NFS unmount may halt the system, etc. The "best" part of this behaviour is that the systemd disables first the possibility to jump to virtual teminals (ctrl-alt-fXX), then it puts the screen black and only after that it select between the failure sequence to do. So the debugging can be done after next reboot, if the binary log files just survived from the hard shutdown usually needed.

    11. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by funky_vibes · · Score: 1

      The one thing that keeps me from using obsd is that each time I remember the close to non-existing fs support even for the most common ones such as ext3.
      no journal, no deal for me.

    12. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by TWX · · Score: 1

      Correct. Right now I'm more thinking of the syslog server. Kinda needs to be running.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    13. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by jythie · · Score: 1

      In such cases I would label the vendor either an, as you say, douche bag, or less than competent. Generally companies that want to support long contracts like that have to find some sort of balance where developers are spread around and doing both new development and older support. Put someone in either category too long and bad things tend to happen.

    14. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by radish · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You know it's interesting. I used to work in finance. We, like you it seems, had a very locked down production environment with huge amounts of testing - pushing builds through multiple stages, reviews and signoffs. Once every month or so we'd shut everything down for a few hours in the middle of the night and roll the world forward. Stability was everything. Downtime was OK if scheduled, a disaster if not.

      Now I work at a web company. We push to prod multiple times per day. There's a process, there are reviews and approvals, but it all happens much more quickly and at a more granular level. Change is constant but small, as opposed to infrequent but total. What's more we're a 24/7 operation so no downtime (as visible to the user) is acceptable. We simply can't schedule a few hours to do our rollout - everything has to happen live.

      You know what I've noticed? We're no less reliable, overall, than the bank was. Yes we have issues, but they tend to be noticed, and fixed, much much faster. When you change everything all at once you run the risk of not being able to figure out what broke when inevitably something does. Rollback is painful because you have so many interdependent changes - in the end you have to pull the whole release to avoid one small issue in a single module. When you roll frequently the scale of change is small so isolating the bug is trivial, and rolling it back the same. Now of course there are huge differences in risk when you're handling people's money vs their cat photos, but I think the view that people working on an agile schedule don't care about stability, and that the only way to achieve stability is through reducing the frequency of change, is demonstrably wrong.

      --

      ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"

    15. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by swb · · Score: 1

      But then again, there are douche bag customers, too, who refuse to update and insist on running grossly outdated software. Usually it has nothing to do with grizzled, old-school IT vets and their deep regard for mainframe era stability but super douchy business owners who just want to cash checks.

      I *just* did a project for a customer like that. They built a brand-new infrastructure (which is quite good in terms of actual hardware) so they could install "new" 2003 r2 x86 servers and run an old x86 version of Metaframe and their ancient x86 ERP software the vendor barely supports.

      There was some loose talk about new ERP software requiring some workflow changes, but it kind of seemed to boil down to just not wanting to spend any money.

    16. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      I think we can conceptually do a rolling release without trouble. I've even written up how to do it: add DT_RUNPATH into each binary in a package pointing to /usr/packages/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib; install any compatibility packages into their own /usr/packages/$COMPATPACKAGE-$VERSION/; and symlink those binaries from /usr/packages/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib/liboldshit.so.1 to /usr/packages/$COMPAT-PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib/liboldshit.so.1.

      When the binary loads, it'll look for every library in /usr/packages/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib first. If it finds nothing, it'll look in the usual places; otherwise, it'll load that library. gtk2-2.1.3 breaks shit that works with gtk2-2.0.1, but they both install to /usr/lib/libgtk2.so.2 and so can't be installed together? Well, install gtk2-2.0.1 to /usr/packages/gtk2/2.0.1/lib/libgtk2.so.2, and symlink to it from /usr/packages/oldshit/1.3.9/lib/libgtk2.so.2; when the user runs /usr/bin/oldshit, it'll load libgtk2 from the latter path, instead of loading it from /usr/lib/libgtk2.so.2.

      The DT_RUNPATH can be left in place always. If a package becomes incompatible, upgrading a library may involve moving the current library's files under /usr/packages, creating symlinks for the broken program under its /usr/packages tree, and then installing the new version of the library. When a newer version of the incompatible program has been tested and vetted, you can upgrade it and use the new library; likewise, brand new programs requiring new libraries that break 90% of the system can use those libraries in the same way, rather than replacing the system library--until that library is considered system-stable.

      You can go by degrees. You can, in fact, say that parts of this rolling release are stable, but other parts are not, and so those other parts will be left at an older point until well-tested. You can essentially mix together various incompatible stages of release.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    17. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by 0ld_d0g · · Score: 1

      The problem with your first company was the process itself. Downtime was OK? Hello! What? Also, a rollback should be an extremely rare event (for either schedule). Lots of rollbacks/downtime shows that people managing the project are not serious about uptime/stability/etc - in which case, the point is moot.

    18. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There are scripts on the Arch Wiki that alleviate most of the PITA aspect of Arch. I found them after I had done what you did, though I can't say I found it terribly difficult to set up as long as I followed the steps in the wiki, then again this was after a few days of trying to get other stuff just to run at all on my system so it's all relative. I've been looking to jump into BSD as a storage distro, sounds interesting based on your description. Personally I found Arch to be far more pleasing and user friendly than Fedora, which I'm currently using.

    19. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      I've been in the industry long enough to have seen plenty of "customers" demanding to save money by short changing long term decisions, only to pay more money in the long run to still have a non-viable system in place, because ... well they don't want to spend the money to do it right.

      Your post just reminds me of spending good money on bad ideas in the name of saving money that is never saved.

      My current philosophy is to help guide people into doing things right, even if it costs a little more now, with the assumption that doing things right now, will save a lot more in the long run. Too many people are only looking at today, and cannot see tomorrow even when we show it to them.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    20. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      We use linux and BSD in our production software, so don't most major corporations with servers. Maybe you want to evaluate who thinks what are toys and who it is that is mindlessly spewing stuff.

    21. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Crazy+Taco · · Score: 1

      There was an era, probably inherited from the big-iron computing model, where we strived for stability and long uptimes. I guess that era is now gone, with rapid-release and lots of little things constantly needing the system to restart.

      I don't think it's gone completely. For the consumer, yes, it's over, because they want the latest and greatest NOW regardless of possible flaws. I think the only reason consumers ever had a non rolling release model is because tech originally started with the enterprise and for the enterprise, and trickled down to the consumers. It wasn't until later that things became so consumer centric with a consumer driven model like rolling release.

      But enterprise hasn't ceased to exist, and there is still a lot of money there. And that money goes first and foremost to companies who provide functional, stable products that don't require a lot of maintenance or upgrades for a while. Because in enterprise IT, upgrades and maintenance cost more than the software, and minimizing those costs are paramount.

      So I think non-rolling releases will continue in the enterprise, and I think for evidence of that you can just look at all the companies that dumped Firefox and went back to IE when Firefox switched to rolling release. Many large IT shops had spokespeople saying new releases of Firefox were coming out so fast that they couldn't certify app compatibility before the next one dropped, and Microsoft jumped on it, pointing out that they were still doing non-rolling releases. Microsoft's market share has dropped off a cliff with consumers of course, but if you look large enterprise's, IE is absolutely everywhere, probably as much as it has ever been. No one does long term, stable support of old stuff like Microsoft's Enterprise and Compatibility browser modes, and there's still a demand for that.

      --
      Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
    22. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Sri+Ramkrishna · · Score: 2

      Stick toa long term release.. Arch Linux is probably more suited for desktop users. Nobody in their right mind would use Arch for enterprise stuff.

    23. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by sjames · · Score: 1

      But my app doesn't require a specific version of glibc. I just updated my glibc (only) a week or two ago.

      If you include re-compiling, it can use a number of other libc implementations as well.

    24. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Right. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

    25. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 1

      I hope you're not recommending OpenBSD as an alternative for better long term support.

      More than a year old? You're out of luck.

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    26. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 1

      I agree with almost everything you wrote there. A month ago, I could watch Flash videos just fine in Firefox. Firefox update comes round, then install a couple of security updates for Flash, and now roughly half the time I play a Flash video the browser locks up and I have to kill the process. Given that I've spent much of this week watching training/conference material on sites using Flash videos, I'm no longer able to use Firefox for work. (Bonus snide remark: If the Firefox team spent more time fixing fundamental architectural flaws that need some real work and less time redecorating for the seventeenth time this week to make my desktop browser less usable but more like a mobile browser no-one uses, at least those hangs wouldn't take out all my other tabs at the same time.)

      Something I've written before and will no doubt write again is that if Microsoft actually played to their strengths in terms of long term stability, and then added a transparent fee for continuing compatibility and security fixes after some reasonable initial period of free support so they were making real money in return for keeping things like Windows 7 running indefinitely, I think they would absolutely clean up with business users. Every Apple user I know seems to be fed up of Apple messing up their previously working gear with OS "upgrades". I'm not sure I even know anyone who still relies on ever-changing web apps for professional work any more -- they're obviously popular in some quarters, but software-as-a-service is already over around here, having utterly failed to live up to the hype and proven in practice to be a combination of recurring charges and frequent unwanted minor changes. What do lots of business people I know actually run? Windows 7 and Office (the locally installed version).

      People with real work to do couldn't care less about rapid release cycles, agile development processes, and proudly telling interview candidates that you'll push code into production on your first day. They just want software that helps them to do whatever they need to do, and that will still be helping them to do it tomorrow.

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    27. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by msim · · Score: 1

      It makes the product sound like a steam "early release" rather than a production system and totally impractical for a live business environment. Some of this stuff is just too "seat of the pants" material.

      I remember working in system admin and the product testing hoops that had to be jumped through by the testers was phenominal. They'd have products in test for three or more months before they'd even start raising notions of sending it out to get approval/review for sending to a live system. Hell I treat my mythtv system at home like a production environment as it isn't worth the wrath of my wife and two year old if it breaks and he cannot watch Peppa Pig.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
    28. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by msim · · Score: 1

      This isn't just in business, most political decisions made don't consider looking past the next election, let alone looking into how it will impact ten let alone thirty years down the line. Smart decisions like that require someone to be brave, and brave doesn't win more votes than "shiny thing, here's money" that most political promises seem to have.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
    29. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by msim · · Score: 1

      The magic words here are "accountability" and "Support contracts". Some people are willing to either do things with open source software and wing it with the potentially marginal support they get. Others do things in-house and have support agreements with their support teams, with virtual money flowing in between groups to provide the support. Others are happiest with support contracts so that they can lever the supporting groups to MAKE them find a solution if they have to.

      I'm not saying "linux isn't for the big boys", there are versions of linux that are at the enterprise level (i.e. RHEL), but there are significant differences between those willing to fly by the seat of their pants, and those whom take these risks seriously.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
    30. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by Barsteward · · Score: 1

      delete glibc completely then see what happens

      --
      "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
    31. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by rdnetto · · Score: 1

      You know what I've noticed? We're no less reliable, overall, than the bank was. Yes we have issues, but they tend to be noticed, and fixed, much much faster. When you change everything all at once you run the risk of not being able to figure out what broke when inevitably something does. Rollback is painful because you have so many interdependent changes - in the end you have to pull the whole release to avoid one small issue in a single module. When you roll frequently the scale of change is small so isolating the bug is trivial, and rolling it back the same. Now of course there are huge differences in risk when you're handling people's money vs their cat photos, but I think the view that people working on an agile schedule don't care about stability, and that the only way to achieve stability is through reducing the frequency of change, is demonstrably wrong.

      This is something that all Gentoo users know, either intuitively or from experience. Gentoo is an interesting case study as it's a rolling release distro (so no discrete releases) where updates have a non-trivial cost (compile time), relative to other distros. The result of this is that users delay non-critical updates significantly, which means that the Gentoo community has a fair bit of experience on the trade-offs of different update granularities. (I believe most people follow a weekly cycle.)

      The short version is that the more time passes between upgrades, the more likely a bug is to occur and the more difficult it can be to identify and fix. You can upgrade as often as you'd like, but the longer you put those upgrades off the more maintenance debt accumulates, and eventually you might not have a choice if a security fix is only released for newer versions.

      --
      Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
    32. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by funky_vibes · · Score: 1

      That's the thing, the features that interest me, are high amounts of code auditing = security, and good multiplatform which also proves a high level of workmanship and modularity of the code.
      That's also why I like ext3, which is among the most well audited code in Linux. It actually goes further to protect you from many types of buggy drivers and disk hardware implementations.
      ZFS and btrfs style multilayer filesystems only interest me insofar that they offer online dynamic multidrive spanning, but these types of features are still much lower priority for me.

  3. G+ by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 5, Funny

    The real news is, someone is still using Google Plus.

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault

    1. Re:G+ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It seems to be popular among kernel developers. This guy uses it too...

    2. Re:G+ by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 2

      The real news is, someone is still using Google Plus.

      Why? What do you use? The facebook? (snicker)

      --
      the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
    3. Re:G+ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Google+: Pretty much anything technical.

      FB/etc.: Today I broke my little toe, I walked the dog, I smoked pot, etc.

    4. Re:G+ by praxis · · Score: 1

      The real news is, someone is still using Google Plus.

      Why? What do you use? The facebook? (snicker)

      It is inconceivable that the man uses nothing?

    5. Re:G+ by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?....

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  4. Situation Dependent by jythie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This really strikes me as something that is going to heavily depend on what the systems are actually doing, how tied to the distro-supplied software the usage is, and how often the releases are.

    Even within 'rolling release' distros there is a huge variation in exactly what that means in terms of changes, updates, frequency, which parts are rolled vs versioned, user control over backdating. This combines with a bit of a matrix of use cases for one to find exactly how much manpower using such a distribution within an organization will eat up. So yeah, 'it depends' pretty much sums it up.

  5. How critical is stability? by davidwr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For a machine that you would just blindly take updates for anyways, rolling releases are probably convenient.

    For mission-critical systems where every change should be tested first, it's probably a bad idea unless rolling back is very easy, as it might be in a VM-with-easy-snapshots environment.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    1. Re:How critical is stability? by TWX · · Score: 1

      When things are that critical usually there's more than one production box, and usually there are development and testing boxes too.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:How critical is stability? by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      At what level? Rolling back a VM means not just rolling back the OS, but Apps as well. What happens if you already upgraded the SQL database? You can't exactly roll that back too. Well, at least not without a restore. When dealing with database driven application in a clustered environment, you simply can't pushed the VMWare "oops" button. Doesn't work that way.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:How critical is stability? by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      Of course they do, on a schedule, when the system is minimally used. Where I work this usually means that the updates get pushed into production on a Sunday (branch offices are guaranteed no business on Sunday) after they've been verified to not crap out on the Model environment. And Model doesn't get the rollout until the update has been verified in the Test environment for at least a week. Also, on mission critical systems, updates are only rolled out once a month at the fastest for only the most critical security updates. Other updates occur once per Quarter. Outside of this plan, if the main system and its redundancies go down any other time, someone's head is going to roll. The Data Center is not to go completely down during production hours for any reason, whatsoever.

    4. Re:How critical is stability? by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      I'm no database expert by any means, but isn't it possible to put the database (its data store I mean, not the application) on a separate partition or drive, and mount that at boot-up time? Shouldn't that solve this problem?

  6. I use Gentoo - but not for much longer by QBasicer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been using Gentoo for many years, and temporarily switched to Funtoo on my personal laptop. I've since graduated and don't spent nearly as much time on my laptop as I used to, which these days mainly runs MythTV.

    I don't think I'd continue with Gentoo - it takes too much time to sort through updates, figure out which packages need to be masked, etc. I'd rather go to Arch next, although I was considering Debian unstable.

    Recently, my video card stopped being supported by the newest nvidia graphics, and the newer versions of Xorg weren't compatible. My masked list is growing as more and more packages have deeper dependancies on newer versions of Xorg. I always figured Portage should honour my masked packages and keep everything at the latest version without stepping on my masked packages, but it wants me to do everything manually. If package 1.2.3 is incompatible with my Xorg, I'll mask 1.2.3 and newer. There is a slight chance, however, that 1.2.4 will be compatible, but it doesn't matter, since Portage made me masked out 1.2.3 and newer, I'll never even know.

    --
    x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
    1. Re:I use Gentoo - but not for much longer by zwede · · Score: 1

      If package 1.2.3 is incompatible with my Xorg, I'll mask 1.2.3 and newer. There is a slight chance, however, that 1.2.4 will be compatible, but it doesn't matter, since Portage made me masked out 1.2.3 and newer, I'll never even know.

      Gentoo lets you mask only a specific version of a package with =package-1.2.3.

    2. Re:I use Gentoo - but not for much longer by QBasicer · · Score: 1

      Yep, very true, but if 1.2.4 *isn't* compatible, you'd need to keep upping the versions, and that's way too much manual intervention. I might as well to to LFS if I wanted that.

      --
      x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
    3. Re:I use Gentoo - but not for much longer by QBasicer · · Score: 1

      I cringe every time Firefox or Chromium recompile, because I know it's going to be hours before it's done.

      --
      x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
  7. Good for developers ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think rolling releases are good for developers, and gives you that whole agile thingy ...

    But really what it instills is a culture of "almost got it" where you'll run the risk of breaking your user's systems and then just say "whoops, we'll fix that next time".

    I think it leads to sloppy release engineering (because, after all, it's just a build), and will be fundamentally incompatible with how companies need to do IT.

    And every time I see Firefox telling me "It is strongly recommended you upgrade to this version" what I really see is "holy crap, did we inject some garbage in that last one".

    I think in general the "continuous release" says "we're not worried that people in the real world can't do this, and we don't care ... we'll fix it on the next release ... maybe".

    So, for your personal desktop, or a sandbox, or a toy ... sure, have at it. But for a real machine, doing real work ... I think "continuous release" is a terrible idea.

    Because in the real world, we're not prepared to patch Prod system just because you committed some new changes -- we have bigger issues to deal with than constantly updating software to keep you happy.

    I should think nobody in a corporate environment is a fan of that. And if you're a small shop of 20 people who are risk takers ... you're not in what I'd call a corporate environment.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Good for developers ... by jythie · · Score: 2

      I wonder how much of it is a case of web developers gaining more status within computing and their priorities seeping into other areas. Rolling releases tend to sound rather webapp inspired to me.

    2. Re:Good for developers ... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

      Rolling releases are *not* good for developers when an update breaks your build environment. What known good previous version do you roll back to?

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    3. Re:Good for developers ... by varag · · Score: 2

      This is the exact scenario where you end up with people still using XP machines and IE6 (seen just last week).

    4. Re:Good for developers ... by pz · · Score: 2

      I run a small scientific laboratory (3-5 people depending on the season) that is very much like a startup. Our primary product is scientific output, and stability is paramount for us, even though we're small. We have standardized (by edict from me, The Boss) on one version of Word, one version of OpenOffice, one version of Matlab, one version of Windows (well, two, because we have some older XP systems used in data collection), etc. The versions selected for standardization shift, but only slowly (ie, it's about time to update from Word 2003, but we'll probably stick with Word 2010). Although I use Fedora for my desktop and laptop systems all of the other Linux boxes are CentOS.

      For me, Fedora's 18 month support cycle is really too short ... so I end up going well past EOL and only update to the most recent version when critical things stop working well.

      Rolling releases? NFW.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    5. Re:Good for developers ... by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      Oh please. People are still using XP/IE6 not because of a particular cycle, but because their company is using some shitty internal web app that only works on IE6.

    6. Re:Good for developers ... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      I guess that means that all of us who don't happen to run Gentoo are just SOL, then?

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  8. Gentoo works for me by Dan+Ost · · Score: 2

    I've been using Gentoo on all my personal machines for the last decade or so.

    Works fine as long as you pay attention.

    --dost

    --

    *sigh* back to work...
    1. Re:Gentoo works for me by halivar · · Score: 2

      I may be a masochist, but I feel kind of sad when I do an "emerge -uDp world" and nothing comes up. I start feeling like should install more stuff.

    2. Re:Gentoo works for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You can always re-merge webkit, that one never lets me down

    3. Re:Gentoo works for me by SupahVee · · Score: 1

      I've alo been using gentoo on my desktops for about the same amount of time, it's by far my favorite of all that I've tried. And while the ricer-level make options don't have as much effect on performance as they used to, I still like the configurability of the whole thing.

      That being said, I wouldn't run Gentoo is a prod environment for any amount of money, it's debian or a redhat-based distro, all the way. The nuances of the portage tree from week to week just lend themselves to too much instability on what might get installed when you're trying to pull in an update.

      Things like "Oops, we green-lit perl-5.16 when it should've been 5.18", and all your modules are broken and perpetually rebuilding for the next week, or "We migrated everyone from grub to grub2 and renamed the original grub to 'grub-static' and didn't tell anyone, sorry about any systems that don't boot"

      I like to tinker on my desktops, I have zero desire to do so with production systems.

      --
      "See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
    4. Re:Gentoo works for me by neurovish · · Score: 1

      I may be a masochist, but I feel kind of sad when I do an "emerge -uDp world" and nothing comes up. I start feeling like should install more stuff.

      I don't think I've dnoe that in over a year....I'm kind of afraid to at this point.

    5. Re:Gentoo works for me by danomac · · Score: 1

      It helps if you do an "emerge --sync" first!

  9. Debian SID by raxx7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been using Debian unstable in my personal computers for years. Occasionally, something breaks.

    But I prefer the long term support of Debian stable and CentOS for internet facing servers and lab workstations.
    Here, it's important to be able to get security fixes without fear of breaking anything for years.

    1. Re:Debian SID by jythie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the 'for years' part is where the disconnect between the two professional use cases (or camps) tends to happen. The people really pushing rolling distributions are not really thinking about production systems that will be running for the next 5-10+ years, but instead on rapidly changing stuff that you do not have to plan more than a few months in advance.

  10. Home USE !=Business Use by bigdady92 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Congrats you can upgrade your latest hot shite box to the latest hotness. Fantatsic. Now what about those servers that have millions of people trying to contact your business through? Hell to the No.

    You want your systems to be running stable, known working, and reliable code. Who cares if it's version 10 and not version 10.0.4134. Let the dev monkies play with the updates in the background and when a service release is out test it further.

    Unless there is a positive gain (security, feature release, or annual patch) then the old code is just fine. It works, don't touch it, leave it the hell alone and go play with your crap in your lab.

    Another reason I hate the DevOPS movement. Combines the worst of habits of a Dev Monkey and a System Admin.

    --
    Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
    1. Re:Home USE !=Business Use by bomb_number_20 · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure how far you're going in your thoughts here, but I know I care about the version and there are lots of occasions when the old code ain't fine.

      Falling too far behind can turn into an even larger problem down the road when you need to update software A to resolve an issue but you can't because you're too far behind and there's no longer an upgrade path because they've done something major (like switched from MySQL to PostGreSQL) on the backend. Better yet, sometimes software A (which is already behind) depends on software B (or vice versa) which is maybe even further behind. Now you're really stuck.

      I think it's important to not confuse stagnant with stable; there's a point where 'stable' can become it's own enemy. Positive gain from just staying up to date with your software might include lower-risk changes months or years from now when you are forced into a hurried, unplanned upgrade to address a security need or get a new feature that you desperately need to resolve some other issue and continue your work.

      --
      That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
    2. Re:Home USE !=Business Use by msim · · Score: 1

      r.e. falling behind, yes that sucks.

      My old employer fell so far behind on cisco call manager that the version they had were out of support and cisco would only touch their issues when billed at a T&M rate (i.e. it ran on windows). Their system was so big complex and unwieldy that it took the better part of 18 months planning to even update to a version of ccm that was even remotely current. I left shortly before that mess went live, that would have been a shitty teething period.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
  11. Some of us run businesses on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Some of us run businesses on Linux. At the company I work at, the product we give to customers is delivered using Linux platforms. We are too busy making money with Linux to be spending all day figuring out if a given software update for some unstructured "rolling release" breaks some program our business needs.

    This "rolling release" nonsense is a euphemism for "we're too lazy to properly test, package, freeze, and take responsibility for a given version of our software". No, I don't want to add 20 features with potential security bugs just to fix a single security hole.

    That is why we use CentOS for most of our critical servers at work. There's something to be said for 10-year support cycles.

    1. Re:Some of us run businesses on Linux by jythie · · Score: 1

      Good example of 'toy' vs 'tool'. With toys, expecting things to go wrong and spending time to investigate and learn is a fine thing. For tools, time spent making the tool work is time spent not using it to do work.

    2. Re:Some of us run businesses on Linux by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      That is why we use CentOS for most of our critical servers at work. There's something to be said for 10-year support cycles.

      The trick is that then the upgrade at 8 years is a nightmare.

      The real problem is that people don't know what they've installed, how they've configured it, and how to upgrade it. Devops really is the answer. My puppet modules work at least on CentOS, CentOS -1, and Fedora/Fedora -1, so I figure out changes on Fedora, and eventually retire the CentOS -2 releases. My CentOS 5 is all gone, just about everything works on CentOS 7 and can be deployed when I get a chance. If you're up against year 8 and you don't know what's on your 8 year-old box, the first thing to do is to be able to replicate it, and then you can think about upgrading.

      This makes the idea of a rolling release less desirable, except to get new features/fixes faster. The sad part is that traditional distros take absolutely no responsibility for upgrades - there's no community expectation of a standard - something dovecot has done this poorly and MailScanner has done this wonderfully. If a million people have to upgrade dovecot to get from CentOS 5 to CentOS 7 then a million people have to figure out how to do the upgrade. That works against the idea of why distros were formed.

      Since you still have to do it all yourself, at least devops makes it manageable. It would be neat if you didn't have to do it all yourself. That's an inevitability.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  12. "Rolling Rease"? It's called CI somewhere else. by Qbertino · · Score: 2

    In software development, especially server-side web development this is called continuous integration (CI for short). I have nothing against it, if automated testing, instant rollback and other things are in place. And if the distro has solid quality control and feature management. ... Somehow I doubt that though.

    If a distro crew knows what they are doing, I'd trust them with rolling releases. ... Maybe I should try this Arch Linux thing out. Any experiences? Any advice?

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:"Rolling Rease"? It's called CI somewhere else. by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 1

      That was going to be my response... I think rolling release is probably a good idea, having lived through the nightmare of enormous organizations that spend 4 or 5 years upgrading from Windows XP / IE6 to Windows 7 and the huge inertia of all that. The shitty old mire of horrendous hacks that you have to dig through to move this sisyphean rock of organizational code, and then everything breaks anyway because no-one actually tests things *properly* when they do their migration plans.

      An environment that carefully migrated each change and made sure they all worked is clearly the alternative.. but it only works if you adopt practices like actually enforcing that *automated* tests are run for all the apps that your organization depends upon, if only for the reassurance value it provides to risk-averse upper management.

  13. gotta agree. by nimbius · · Score: 2

    rolling release, while in the case of Gentoo initially more tedious to set up than just 'click install' is a refreshing departure from packaged distros. from a devops standpoint its no more or less manageable either. I create a base gentoo image and DD it to servers. afterwards salt takes over and doles out configuration. port tree zaps, use, and merge can also be controlled and if some security vulnerability is found in a compiled option for an application, you can command your servers to recompile the affected package without that option instead of waiting for a workaround or patch, which might not be feasible in a production environment.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  14. No surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Greg was an active Gentoo developer.

  15. Void Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try Void Linux, a rolling distro that doesn't suck:

    - System-wide LibreSSL by default (maybe the first linux distro to do so)
    - runit instead of systemd
    - multilib aware ... and more.

  16. Even when it's not broken, it's different, needs t by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Agreed. Also, even if it's not _broken_, I don't want things constantly changing under my feet without even being able to meaningfully talk about what changed in different versions.

    It's good to be able to say "here are the major changes between "Windows 7 and Windows 8". It's definitely good to be able to say "this software works on Windows 8", rather than "this software works on versions released between 2013-10-12 and 2015-01-03".

  17. Arch for a while, FreeBSD for life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I personally prefer rolling release.
    I used to use Arch, until they started trashing their ecosystem. Giving up KISS by adopting systemd, moving /bin, etc. It became a bitch to maintain with all the breaking changes imposed.

    Ultimately I found FreeBSD's ports to be amazing rolling release system. Far more stable than Arch, you don't have to break your junk if you don't want to. And that makes me happy. The kernel moves in increments, everything else you compile or download binaries. I end up with a much more optimized and stable system than if I had stuck with Arch. Yet everything on my box is up to date.

    Each has its pros and cons. I've had to use Slackware and Ubuntu for my work. They're practically zero maintenance which is probably a good thing for ~generic~ computer users.

  18. Depends on the target user... by gwolf · · Score: 1

    I am absolutely not surprised by this: A well-known kernel hacker has enough systemwide understanding for the ocassional glitch to become obvious. He also uses most probably a very specific subset of programs for his day-to-day activities — I (a very far cry from his skill levels) haven't changed my main tools in over ten years. I mean, a tiling window manager, Emacs, a browser... Specific little tools can vary, but they won't jeopardize my system's overall behaviour — This means, it won't mean me spending time head-scratching to keep working.

    Now, a developer is a far cry from a systems administrator. A sysadmin values stability over all things. I don't want a random upgrade to become a lost hour understanding the new configuration format of foobard.

    And of course, casual users... If my wife desktop had changed from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 without me preparing her, I'm sure she would not have appreciated it.

  19. Who's doing what now? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    the lieutenant Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman

    The what? Did he develop "lieutenant Linux," with a small L? Or is he a lieutenant like Columbo?

    Other than that, what should I know about who this guy is? Because the summary (which is, I'm told, also the article) tells me nothing.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:Who's doing what now? by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 1

      He's a kernel lieutenant. Which means that he's one of the guys that Linus Torvalds trusts to shepherd patches into the main line of the kernel. In other words, he's one mean code-farmer. Not your average user.

    2. Re:Who's doing what now? by eihab · · Score: 1

      Other than that, what should I know about who this guy is? Because the summary (which is, I'm told, also the article) tells me nothing.

      2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw

      2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMeH7wqOwXA

      --
      If you can't mod them join them.
  20. Arch... Ugh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Arch breaks. Often. Breakage is the trouble with rolling release distributions, and an intolerable problem for anyone not wanting to spend the time un-breaking things.

    Loyal but naive Arch users are always quick to defend it, "my system has never broken" "you must be doing something wrong" etc. but these discussions are always about semantics. Just because it's a one-liner to fix doesn't mean that it isn't broken. If it requires my attention to keep working, then it's broken. Just because it is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend time fixing it.

    Arch is a great way to learn Linux, and the Arch wiki is a great resource not exclusive to just Arch. But you'd have to be out of your mind to use it for anything in production. The Arch FAQ makes it pretty clear: YOU, the user, is responsible for keeping your system updated, functional and stable; but the more packages you have installed, the more likely you are to get broken when upstream updates something.

    Also from Arch docs:
    Warning: Do not be tempted to perform partial updates, as they are not supported by Arch Linux and may cause instability: the whole system should be upgraded when upgrading a component. Also note that infrequent system updates can complicate the update process.

    Translation: You want to update package foosicle-1.2 to foosicle-1.3 because it has a security problem. Oh, you don't want to update X, Firefox, KDE, and the kernel? I hope you do want instability then. BTW, stay on top of your updates unless you want to get really hosed.

    No thanks.

    I use Ubuntu LTS releases on my computers at work for three reasons:
    1. Reading the Arch wiki to un-fuck Java after I updated my system to fix a security issue for a different package is not a good use of my time.
    2. Not a good use of my time to compile from source because the distribution ships with something ancient or doesn't have it at all (I'm looking at you, RHEL).
    3. Will keep getting updates for the lifetime of the hardware.

    1. Re:Arch... Ugh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Actually, FreeBSD-STABLE is really the definition of that word. I've been tracking that monthly for 8 years and it's only bit me three times, twice because I failed to read the mailing list where someone else discovered the issue first.

  21. Bad experience by JohnFen · · Score: 1

    My experiences with rolling-release software has been unpleasant, so I will continue to avoid it to the best of my ability.

  22. Who's doing what now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    He reports to colonel Panic and general Protection-Fault :)

  23. Remember his background by houghi · · Score: 1

    He comes form a S.u.S.E., SuSE, SUSE and openSUSE background where the rolling release are not that old yet. I believe they started in the 12.x or even the 13.x with it.

    Before that it was a new version every 6 to 8 months and a service period for 2 to 3 years (or 7 if you had the pro with support)

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  24. Meh by Sin2x · · Score: 1

    Rolling-release should have been default for desktop distros from the start. Maintainers have no moral right to claim what is stable and what is not, since they do not write the code and are rarely proficient enough to judge its quality. It's the developer's prerogative and a task they manage to perform sufficiently, without the need for additional bureaucracy. Server distros are a whole different world, obviously.

    --
    Waka Waka!
  25. Great for Desktops by Tepar · · Score: 1

    IMO, rolling releases are great for desktop/laptop machines, but not so great for servers. There's something to be said for installing and configuring your OS on your work machine exactly once, for the life of the machine, and then it just stays up to date. No more twice a year upgrades that bork everything (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu) and make you reinstall anyway, no more "backport" repositories if you want to run the latest KDE or LibreOffice or whatever. Small, incremental updates are actually a lot easier to manage than giant upgrades that replace almost everything on the system.

    I'm currently using Manjaro (related to Arch Linux), and I'm not looking back.

    1. Re:Great for Desktops by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      IMO, rolling releases are great for desktop/laptop machines, but not so great for servers.

      I would have said exactly the opposite. I strongly dislike rolling releases in general, but my experience is that they're less annoying on servers than on end-user machines. Rolling releases mean that you have to put up with unexpected UI changes, which is what makes them hurt.

  26. Good for him? by Guspaz · · Score: 1

    I don't. I like predictably scheduled releases. Ubuntu's release strategy particularly pleases me, with predictable releases every 6 months, and long term support releases every 2 years, with support for upgrading either from regular release to regular release, or from LTS release to LTS release.

    Of course, I don't run Linux as a desktop platform, so Ubuntu still works nicely for me in a server environment. I tend to run only LTS releases on important servers (typically waiting until 6 months after an LTS release before upgrading to it, and regular releases on unimportant servers (like my home server).

  27. Not for production use by iamacat · · Score: 1

    Rolling distros are great if you are a technology enthusiast and completely manage your own machine. If you are supporting a large number of users or servers, you want to test a fixed configuration and deploy it to everyone once a year. In general the key to stability is to branch a code at some point and focus on bug fixes rather than new features/cleanup/refactoring.

  28. Another idiot on the ignore list by Khyber · · Score: 1

    He's apparently abandoned the idea of a long-term stable box.

    Since he's abandoned that idea, everything he says has just become useless advice at several of my IT jobs, where we depends upon long-term stability and reliability.

    *AND* he's using Arch as a primary. Nope. Too much bloat.

    Mark down yet another useless person to listen to on the list.

    Appropriate captcha: Detached - as in this idiot is detached from reality.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    1. Re:Another idiot on the ignore list by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      You want your kernel developers running something old and stable? I sure don't, I want him running something fresh where he finds the bugs before they get to me.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank