Comment by night862 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by night862 | Hacker News Reader

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About releases: They typically refer to the OS version or base in these rolling distros such as Fedora. Rolling releases aren't all like Sid.

In Fedora, there is a base OS version with a sort of configuration, specif directory structure, major architectural versions of software (like Gnome or KDE), sometimes cryptographic policy, or other system backends such as logging or DNS resolution.

Fedora used its release cycle to migrate to systemd-resolved, to pick an example, because this change introduced structural changes to the way the system operated. In the release in question, system services leverage the D-Bus API to get DNS lookups, systemd binds to the local port. By segregating this behavior by release, it makes the dependency tree much simpler to manage at the cost of possibly needing to backport patches, but Distributions are doing much more than shipping mostly upstream packages like Arch is.

I always thought arch would be well suited to this sort of thing. Arch Build System is very good, and since packages are very close to upstream, it would be very easy to make your own ABS repo as it stands. It is very similar to the ports tree, arch linux has very little flavor in many respects.

Fedora isn't a rolling distro the way Arch is. And even Arch while popularly known as a rolling release distro doesn't entirely live up to this ethos. Python 3.12 & Gnome release delays just to give an example.

Fedora has something that resembles Arch as a rolling distro. Their unstable branch for development which they call Fedora Rawhide.

That said you wouldn't be wrong to call Arch a rolling release distro because it is one for the most part.

You are working off an unusual definition of "rolling release". A rolling release just means that there are no major version bumps that require an active opt-in when upgrading.

And besides, the behavior of Fedora Rawhide can easily be achieved in Arch Linux by just adding the [testing] repo that's already prepared (but commented out) in your /etc/pacman.conf

> A rolling release just means that there are no major version bumps that require an active opt-in when upgrading.

Indeed. However IMO this definition is not complete without taking into account the matching status of upstream software versions available and package versions made available by the distro at any given point in time. This is the continuous delivery expected and what gives a distro rolling status among its peers.

> Python 3.12 & Gnome release delays just to give an example.

GNOME updates usually come when the packagers have time, latest this usually is the .1 release. 47 for example was available like a few days after the official release, if not a day or so after (I didn't check specific dates, but that was when I updated).

With other software it usually depends on if dependencies can work with the new version. LLVM is a major package that always is like 1 release behind due to stuff that depend on it not being updated for the new version. And shipping multiple of a single package is something they try to avoid.

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