The stable version of openSUSE will remain on the regular release model

Jul 29, 2014 14:20 GMT  ·  By

The openSUSE developers have announced that openSUSE Factory, the development distribution of the project, has switched now to a rolling release model.

This rolling release model has been proposed for numerous other distros in the past and some teams decided to adopt it, while others kept the old system in place. But what is a rolling release? Basically, the developers don't push big updates to the operating system with incremental versions and just update the OS whenever there is something worthwhile.

On the Linux platform, the developers are split down the middle when it comes to adopting a rolling release model. Arch Linux seems to be doing just fine with this type of development, and others like Fedora, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint are still following a regular release model.

To be fair, the Ubuntu development branch is also a rolling release distro, but the stable one remains unchanged. The same will be happening with OpenSuSE and users shouldn't notice any bad effects.

“In the old development model, an army of packagers would shoot new packages and updates to Factory, with a relatively small team of Factory Maintainers taking care of the integration process of all those packages. This often took a long time to stabilize for a release.”

“In the new ‘rolling release’ development model, package submissions cannot go to Factory directly. First they have to prove to be functional and trustworthy in a staging project. Staging projects are projects in our Open Build Service where groups of submissions are collected, reviewed, compiled and tested with openQA. But even after the packages survived the staging project, they don't directly end up in Factory,” reads the announcement from the openSUSE team.

The first effect of this new release model should be a much faster release schedule. For example, openSUSE 13.1 was launched in November 2013 and openSUSE 13.3 is scheduled to arrive in March 2015. There is no word on openSUSE 14.1.

The project is not intentionally slow with the releases and the devs are not generally late with new versions, but this is how they have planned their work. It's not a big project, like Ubuntu for example with lots of developers, and it takes them a longer time to test and make everything ready for launch.

It's possible that with a rolling release model for openSUSE Factory, the new versions of openSUSE might arrive earlier than anticipated. In the meantime, you can download the latest version of openSUSE from Softpedia.