openSUSE: Rolling release project Tumbleweed proposed

In a post on the openSUSE mailing list, developer and Novell Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman has proposed a new "rolling update" version of the openSUSE Linux distribution. In his announcement, Kroah-Hartman says that it's time to "stop talking about it, and actually trying to do it".

The developer describes the new project, known as "openSUSE Tumbleweed", as "a repository that is a rolling updated version of openSUSE containing the latest 'stable' versions of packages for people to use." Kroah-Hartman notes that openSUSE Tumbleweed would differ from Factory in that "Factory always contains the bleeding edge versions of our packages that the maintainers have created," adding that "Sometimes these packages don't work well together and cause the machine to fail to boot (hence the need for Factory-Tested). Tumbleweed will contain 'stable' versions of these latest packages that have been deemed to 'work' properly."

The kernel version would also differ from Factory and it would primarily be up to developers and package maintainers as to which packages should be included. Ideally, Kroah-Hartman says that he would like to do this "for real" following the release of 11.4 due to "the amount of time it will take to get the work-flow down properly", as well as because of the other time constraints and obligations he has.

Rumours surfaced recently that Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution would be switching to a rolling release, but they were quickly denied by Engineering Director of Ubuntu Rick Spencer. The latest stable release of openSUSE is version 11.3 from mid-July, while the current development version is openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3 from the 11th of November.

See also:

• Attachmate: Novell's openSUSE project is safe, a report from The H.
• Novell acquired by Attachmate, a report from The H.
• Health Check: openSUSE, a report from The H.

(crve)