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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?

8 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.

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

      Shit, I accidentally RTFA then =(

  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.

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    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   We filed a bug once, and they said "we don't support that version because it's a month old, and therefore 4 versions out of date, you need to upgrade".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.

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    2. 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.

    3. 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.

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

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

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    Hell Segmentation fault

  4. 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.