A stable and well-tested rolling release

Time to Go to Press

Not everything is automated. "There is some human oversight, as OpenQA may show errors that we know are acceptable. We don't support upgrades from openSUSE 13.2 to Tumbleweed, for example, but run the check through OpenQA to see how badly is it broken. So, OpenQA will fail that test but we know it's not a deal breaker," said Brown. In cases like these, the developers will go ahead with the distribution. However, even then critical issues can appear, and the release won't happen unless a human has looked at it and fixed it. "Once everything is ready and green, we see the power of OBS, which publishes the images magically," said Brown.

Conclusion

I have been using the new Tumbleweed for a while, and now I know what makes it so stable. Brown actually joked that the terms stable and rolling release are contradictory, but openSUSE Tumbleweed has succeeded in combining the concepts.

The Author

Swapnil Bhartiya is a writer and journalist covering Linux and open source for more than 10 years. He is also a science fiction writer whose stories have been broadcast on Indian radio and published in leading Indian magazines. He writes for many publications, including IDG's ITWorld and Linux Foundation's Linux.com. He founded an open source web magazine while living in Europe. Swapnil currently resides in Washington, DC.

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