Tag Archives: rolling release

In defense of Fedora’s release cycle

Posted on by
3

Earlier this week, Thorsten Leemhuis published a thoughtful post about what he’d change if he magically became the supreme leader of Fedora. In that post and subsequent commentary on Mastodon and Fedora Discussion, he talked about changing Fedora’s release cycle. Since the Fedora Linux release process is my job, I figured I should explain why I disagree.

Integration projects are different

If you haven’t read the post, you should. But here’s the short version: Fedora Linux uses a release model rooted in the 1990s and should move to a “modern” model. Thorsten suggests a one-month cadence for those who want the latest versions and a one-year “steady” release. Such a model has worked well for Firefox, he argues, and so it should work for Fedora.

The key reason I think this is wrong is because Firefox is a development project whereas Fedora is an integration project. Integration projects don’t write a lot of code, they take the work of others and turn it into a coherent whole. This is a fundamentally different kind of work and it takes longer by necessity.

You can’t reliably integrate disparate pieces when they’re in constant motion. That’s why we have freezes leading up to the beta and final releases — they give the QA team time to test against a stationary target. It takes time to run through all of the test cases that make Fedora Linux a reliable operating system. So the choice becomes reducing the pre-release testing or spending a significant portion of the cycle in a freeze, which limits the the usefulness of the one-month cycle.

You can solve some of this with automated testing. And the QA does do a lot of automated testing. But those tests still take time, and there are a lot of interrelated parts in a Linux distribution.

Six months isn’t magic

There’s nothing objectively correct about a six month release cycle. It’s mostly because that’s how you get two releases a year. If the calendar had 10 months, the release cycle would be five. But there is a lower bound where you’ve become a de facto rolling release, even if you still have discrete releases. I don’t know where exactly that boundary is, but I suspect that one month is at or just beyond it.

Similarly, there’s an upper limit where you’re now a slow, plodding project. Again, I can’t say where the line is. Six months may be uncomfortably close to it, but I suspect it’s closer to a year. And, of course, it depends on the nature of the specific project.

So there’s no particular reason Fedora Linux couldn’t move to a shorter release cycle. Five months is totally doable. Four is possible. Three would require a tremendous amount of work before it could be considered. But what’s the benefit of going to a shorter cycle? Does five months instead of six make a meaningful difference? At least with six months, you know there’s a release targeted for April and October. Predictability is nice.

Solving the actual problem

The bigger issue, though, is that I don’t think people actually want this. Yes, you might want your web browser and other applications to update frequently. But that doesn’t mean you want your compiler or Python interpreter or C libraries to update frequently. Most people will avoid this in favor of the “steady” stream. This eliminates the intended benefit to upstream projects.

The people who do want everything to update quickly use a rolling release distribution, something that Thorsten explicitly says his proposal is not.

Fundamentally, the proposal looks at the problem the wrong way. The problem isn’t that a six month cycle is too long. The problem is that application delivery is coupled to operating system delivery. Most people want the latest versions of the applications they care about and for everything else to remain unchanged. The challenge, of course, is that not everyone draws that distinction in the same way.

We unsuccessfully tried to solve this with Modularity. Flatpak, at least for graphical applications, offers another attempt to solve this problem.

Historically, the system and application layers have been distributed together. Figuring out how to decouple these (including how to draw the line between them) is the interesting work. And it provides real value to the end users.

What do “rolling release” and “stable” mean in the context of operating systems?

Posted on by
1

In a recent post on his blog, Chris Siebenmann wrote about his experience with Fedora upgrades and how, because of some of the non-standard things he does, upgrades are painful for him. At the end, he said “What I really want is a rolling release of ‘stable’ Fedora, with no big bangs of major releases, but this will probably never exist.”

I’m sympathetic to that position. Despite the fact that developers have worked to improve the ease of upgrades over the years, they are inherently risky. But what would a stable rolling release look like?

“Arch!” you say. That’s not wrong, but it also misses the point. What people generally want is new stuff so long as it doesn’t cause surprise. Rolling releases don’t prevent that, they spread it out. With Fedora’s policy, for example, major changes (should) happen as the release is being developed. Once it’s out, you get bugfixes and minor enhancements, but no big changes. You get the stability.

On the other hand, you can run Fedora Rawhide, which gets you the new stuff as soon as it’s available, but you don’t know when the big changes will come. And sometimes, the changes (big and little) are broken. It can be nice because you get the newness quickly. And the major changes (in theory) don’t all come at once.

Rate of change versus total change

For some people, it’s the distribution of change, not the total amount of change that makes rolling releases compelling. And in most cases, the changes aren’t that dramatic. When updates are loosely-coupled or totally independent, the timing doesn’t matter. The average user won’t even notice the vast majority of them.

But what happens when a really monumental change comes in? Switching the init system, for example, is kind of a big deal. In this case, you generally want the integration that most distributions provide. It’s not just that you get an assortment of packages from your distribution, it’s that you get a set of packages that work together. This is a fundamental feature for a Linux distribution (excepting those where do-it-yourself is the point).

Applying it to Fedora

An alternate phrasing of what I understand Chris to want is “release-quality packages made available when they’re ready, not on the release schedule.” That’s perfectly reasonable. And in general, that’s what Fedora wants Rawhide to be. It’s something we’re working on, particularly with the ability to gate Rawhide updates.

But part of why we have defined releases is to ensure the desired stability. The QA team and other testers put a lot of effort into automated and manual tests of releases. It’s hard to test against the release criteria when the target keeps shifting. It’s hard to make the distribution a cohesive whole instead of a collection of packages.

What Chris asks for isn’t wrong or unreasonable. But it’s also a difficult task to undertake and sustain. This is one area where ostree-based variants like Fedora CoreOS (for servers/cloud), Silverblue (for desktops), and IoT (for edge devices) bring a lot benefit. The big changes can be easily rolled back if there are problems.