I read some online discussions about rolling release Linux distributions yesterday – including two about whether distros should switch to a rolling release system. Based on what I read I can only draw one conclusion: the art of logic is dying.

It was nice to see my favourite distro – Arch Linux – feature in discussions as a primary example, but people seem to confuse the process of a rolling release, with the goals Arch adds to it. This was most obvious with those opposing rolling releases, but I’m pretty sure at least some proponents had the same confusion.

What confusion do I mean? The sort where people object to a rolling release because they “don’t need to be on the bleeding edge” or “packages need to spend enough time being tested”. Both of these are valid desires, though I personally prefer a distro that does keep me at the bleeding edge, but neither of them has anything to do with whether or not you use a rolling release.

Yes Arch does choose to be on the bleeding edge, and yes you pretty much need a rolling release to stay there. But that doesn’t apply the other way around, you don’t need to stay on the bleeding edge just because you have a rolling release. If you wanted to you could easily make a distro where each package spends at least six months in a testing repository before going into the main system, and still do it as a rolling release.

Because the only thing that a rolling release means is that all packages upgrade to the most recent version that’s been approved by testing as part of the presently installed system. Instead of some packages only upgrading every X months when there’s a new version of the distro.

True, even with a longer testing period there are arguments  against a rolling release. One of the better ones I read yesterday dealt with the difficulty of such a moving target for a corporate roll-out to a large number of computers. But unfortunately the majority of the arguments boiled down to “I don’t need to be on the bleeding edge” and “packages need to spend enough time being tested”.

So much for logic.