openSUSE Factory -- Questions

First of all, I think that the transition of Factory to a somewhat tested rolling release is a very exciting move by openSUSE! Thanks a lot for giving us this option.

This begs for comparison with Arch, which is currently what many would consider to be the most successfully executed rolling release. What level of stability and/or breakage can we expect from openSUSE Factory compared to Arch? And what about frequency of updates?

Has any thought been given to delta updates for Factory? That would be WONDERFUL for users who have slower or bandwidth-limited internet.

What will happen to Factory users running proprietary Radeon Catalyst or proprietary Nvidia drivers as the kernel and xorg stack get frequently updated?

I have an old laptop that I use only a couple of times a year for traveling. The rest of the time it sits in storage. Would openSUSE Factory break if I only applied updates every 6 or 12 months?

Thanks a lot!

I am not involved in the development so this is only my opinion from a user. This really depends on your use case. If you only use one program, say Firefox. If for some reason there is a huge bug in it you might see openSUSE is buggy, even if other programs work. As for stability, I see this to mean unchanging, which a rolling release is certainly not. If you don’t want surprises, why are you considering a rolling release in the first place? Though, there is a lot of automatic and manually quality assurance put into the release. Take a look at the way factory is now developed and openqa.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Factory_development_model

And what about frequency of updates?

I would assume packages are tested before being deployed, so there might be some delay.

Has any thought been given to delta updates for Factory? That would be WONDERFUL for users who have slower or bandwidth-limited internet.

I would love this, especially for well maintained and highly used OBS repositories such as “Games”. Saving myself 5-10minutes downloading a minor update to the 500mb 0ad data would help a lot.

What will happen to Factory users running proprietary Radeon Catalyst or proprietary Nvidia drivers as the kernel and xorg stack get frequently updated?

Probably issues. :slight_smile: I would put packages like those on hold until you are sure they work.

I have an old laptop that I use only a couple of times a year for traveling. The rest of the time it sits in storage. Would openSUSE Factory break if I only applied updates every 6 or 12 months?

If you want to be sure it works I would use a released version of openSUSE, I advise you to never rely on something you haven’t tested.

On 2014-08-18 21:06, rahim123 wrote:

> This begs for comparison with Arch, which is currently what many would
> consider to be the most successfully executed rolling release. What
> level of stability and/or breakage can we expect from openSUSE Factory
> compared to Arch? And what about frequency of updates?

Some breakage.

The “tested” part of factory comes from automated testing. If something
big breaks, the updates are withheld. But if they are minor, or not part
of the automatic tests, they are published - and they may affect
something you really need.

For those smaller broken parts they expect human testers to come in and
report, as always.

> Has any thought been given to delta updates for Factory? That would be
> WONDERFUL for users who have slower or bandwidth-limited internet.
>
> What will happen to Factory users running proprietary Radeon Catalyst or
> proprietary Nvidia drivers as the kernel and xorg stack get frequently
> updated?

Well, if you want answers from the people doing it, you have to ask on
the factory mail list, IMO.

As to the graphic drivers, the rpms are simply not published for
factory. The 13.1 driver may work, till it doesn’t (or maybe not). Who
knows.

> I have an old laptop that I use only a couple of times a year for
> traveling. The rest of the time it sits in storage. Would openSUSE
> Factory break if I only applied updates every 6 or 12 months?

Then twice a year you would have to work hard for a day or two to get it
updated and fully working. With bad luck, your instant of update there
is something important broken, which will not get a solution perhaps in
a day or in weeks.

I would instead use Evergreen on that machine.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

That’s probably unrealistic. The people who maintain factory have enough work to do without that.

You can reduce the bandwidth by updating less often – say every two week instead of several times a week.

What will happen to Factory users running proprietary Radeon Catalyst or proprietary Nvidia drivers as the kernel and xorg stack get frequently updated?

I do have factory on a computer with a nvidia card. I install the nvidia driver the hard way. On every kernel update, I will need to reinstall the driver.

And then the update to snapshot 20140816 broke nvidia. I had to fix it (reinstalling the nvidia driver would also have worked).

The nvidia drivers from opensuse 13.1 do not work. The later versions for 13.1 maybe worked for the 3.15.x kernels, but not for the 3.16.x kernels.

I have an old laptop that I use only a couple of times a year for traveling. The rest of the time it sits in storage. Would openSUSE Factory break if I only applied updates every 6 or 12 months?

I would not advise that. A software problem, just when you are ready to travel, sounds like a headache.

On 2014-08-18 22:26, nrickert wrote:
>
> rahim123;2660038 Wrote:
>> as any thought been given to delta updates for Factory? That would be
>> WONDERFUL for users who have slower or bandwidth-limited internet.
> That’s probably unrealistic. The people who maintain factory have
> enough work to do without that.

Dunno. Aren’t they automatically generated?

However, I think the deltas are made for update repos, not normal repos.
And, although factory does have an update repo, it is not really used.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

On 2014-08-18 22:43 (GMT) Carlos E. R. composed:

> nrickert wrote:

>> rahim123;2660038 Wrote:

>>> as any thought been given to delta updates for Factory? That would be
>>> WONDERFUL for users who have slower or bandwidth-limited internet.

>> That’s probably unrealistic. The people who maintain factory have
>> enough work to do without that.

> Dunno. Aren’t they automatically generated?

> However, I think the deltas are made for update repos, not normal repos.
> And, although factory does have an update repo, it is not really used.

Regular releases have a limited number of iterations to calculate deltas
against, rather the opposite of Factory, where tens or maybe even hundreds of
releases of individual packages aren’t uncommon. Absent several orders of
magnitude increase in capacity, BS would be terminally behind schedule if
this was attempted.

The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive.

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

I would be more hoping deltas would save the server side some bandwidth also but I suppose they would need to be generated for each package which would take a lot of cpu time.

To generate deltas, you need to keep the old versions around. Factory changes are too dynamic for that to be worth doing.

Thanks to everyone for their helpful replies!