Traditionally, new software has put forth major releases every couple of years or so, with minor releases in between for security and bug fixes. Known as point releases, this strategy continues to be the primary choice for many leading distributions such as Debian, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. However, over the years, a new strategy has emerged, with individual packages being released as soon as they are ready, rather than waiting for the next major release. Called rolling releases, this strategy is used by Arch Linux, Gentoo, and Manjaro. In any particular instance, the effectiveness of either strategy depends very much on having enough developers and upon the developers’ conscientiousness. However, both have pros and cons, which is why hybrid approaches with characteristics of both strategies are increasingly common.

Point Releases

Point releases have the advantage of tradition. They are well-established, and expertise in them is widespread. Typically, they are administered centrally, making them easy to coordinate, which is no small advantage to many projects, especially distributions, that have hundreds of maintainers and thousands of packages. Even with Snap, Flatpak, or AppImage, most packages have dependencies on other packages – sometimes dozens. As a result, maintainers usually cannot work alone, but must consult with maintainers of other packages to ensure that their work is compatible. In fact, the complexity of a major release is so great that either a development freeze is needed in order to finalize it, or else a major release is mostly a combination of all the point releases since the last one. Otherwise, a major release would be a moving target.

To further aid in the release effort, point release projects often have rigorous, comprehensive standards. For instance, the Debian guidelines are often said to be what makes Debian what it is. They are also the main reason that Debian is the foundation of choice for security-focused distributions like Kali Linux. Even Debian’s Unstable and Testing repositories are considered reliable enough for distributions like Ubuntu to draw upon them.

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