Too bad. PPAs are still too esoteric for normal use and waiting 6 months for the latest versions which often include important usability and bug fixes is way too long a time. I know some people think apt-get is the holy grail of Linux software, and I agree it does have its pluses, but personally I think it's just a hack for the shockingly bad state of Linux software installation, which is also, I think, part of the rationale for 6-month releases.
No, I think that this is simply Ubuntu providing exactly what they promise: an up-to-date system that is also stable. If you don't think it's up-to-date enough, I suggest trying out CentOS or Debian for a while.
It simply isn't easy to provide a stable system without some kind of release cycle. How would they gracefully upgrade something like Python or Perl or that have wide effects on the system? These kinds of changes are not trivial.
It's not that Linux software installation is that bad. It's that they've solved the "dependency hell" problem that well. Now they have to handle the implications of all of those dependencies and the complex interactions of all of those version changes.
I mean, it's easy to just roll the bleeding edge version of a package out if it has no dependencies. But it's rarely that simple.
If you know of a solution to all of these problems, I suspect you'd be able to make a lot of money building a distro to compete with Ubuntu.
What do you think would be a better installation method than apt?
I use PPAs for Firefox nightlies and wine. It's very easy to set up - just copy-and-paste from the website into Synaptic, and then it updates automatically.
Well that's kind of the point--there isn't a better way in Linux, but that doesn't mean there isn't a better way to do it in general. Apt was designed I think mainly as a workaround for Linux dependency hell, with the side effect of it being convenient to install things. But the tradeoff is that all software updates rely on a single central location--Canonical's servers (besides PPAs). What if they go out of business, or the servers go down for some reason one day? The second you step outside of the Apt walled garden you're right back to the wild jungle of Linux dependency hell that makes it nigh-impossible to install anything without hair-pulling compilation sessions, in my experience.
And yes, PPAs have inched closer to user-friendliness with recent releases, but they're not to the point where a non-terminal user can easily comprehend the concept and then install their own.
Bringing this all back to the point--rolling releases--it's too difficult for many to install PPAs, and even so, PPAs don't always exist for core components that frequently have high-visibility regressions or bugs in new Ubuntu releases. For example, in Maverick hibernate for my laptop is broken. It freezes when it tries to hibernate. Where do I even start looking for a PPA that solves this problem? I don't--instead, I hold my breath for 6 months and don't use hibernate. That's not an acceptable solution.
I guess the QA infrastructure isn't up to the task for rolling OS releases. But it would make a lot of sense to separate the release cycles of the actual OS and applications it supplies. With Maemo this has worked pretty well:
Seriously? Have you seen the comments on maemo's bugzilla saying "it's marked as fixed, when is it going to be released" -> "we don't publish the release dates beforehand" -> "but it still doesn't work for me, it's not fixed"... etc.
No, I do not believe it works well. The main / extras split is unavoidable for any new smartphone with apps repository. Maemo has a lot of problems because of not doing more frequent rolling updates - I'd actually blame not being able to type a small letter at the beginning of a sentence, for ~half a year as a result of crap release cycle.
The issues you mention mostly deal with the platform itself, and that has obviously been affected by the switch of focus from Maemo to MeeGo.
Agreed that the platform could benefit from rolling releases as well, but at least the current approach allows that for applications. Something that most Linux distributions don't do.
