I looked around the forums but couldn't find a post or sticky somewhere.
I am new to rolling-release Arch and would like to understand how does Garuda manage the roadmap (schedule) of its releases?
As a starting point, and I know this is not how rolling-releases work, in Kubuntu there are dates at which the releases are scheduled, so you know what will be released when. Then when you perform a distribution upgrade it takes, say your Kubuntu 20.04 and upgrades it to Kubuntu 20.10. If you want to change flavor for Ubuntu, you have to use the Ubuntu ISO and start from fresh, or almost (there is a way to switch the DE directly without the ISO I've done it but let's keep the concept simple here for my question ).
Now for Garuda how does this work?
Do we know when the next release is scheduled?
And when it is released, can we perform a distribution upgrade (pacman -Syu I guess) of the current installed edition without changing the edition to another one? For example, if running Dr460nized non-gaming Serpent Eagle, I run pacman -Syu to upgrade to Dr460nized non-gaming Black Arch (let's assume next release will be called that)?
Alright, so what you got right already is that rolling-release is unlike fixed release.
We dont require the users to do a dist-upgrade to get to the new version, in fact when you update regularly (like, daily, weekly, monthly.. whatever you prefer) you are always on the latest version. So if you were on lets say a previous release called "Imperial Eagle" your system automatically became "Serpent eagle" after the latest version came out. The only thing which would require a new installation is eg. a change in BTRFS subvolume layout (that happened in the past when we adopted OpenSUSE style subvolumes) but that is not going to happen again any time soon I guess. So no worries, a big advantage of rolling release is not having to do reinstallations regularly.
What however might be a missunderstanding is that the next version is not called "BlackArch" - BlackArch is another Arch based distribution which might be called the Arch variant of Kali Linux (a popular distro used for mainly pentesting & hacking). Since BlackArch allows adding their repo to a regular Arch installation we can do the same and ship an iso which has the same tools installed (and accessible in the repo) as BlackArch, making it a nice option for people who do pentesting and want to have Garudas features ootb
Talking about release schedules: we do a new release (which is actually an iso refresh most of the times) when we feel like the work of the last time is "ready" or a new major version of a DE is released (like Plasma or GNOME for example)
That is the small piece of the puzzle I was missing, which is in fact your "releases" are actually not real releases in fixed-release terms, they are a point in time where you froze the packages (that users already got available) and decided to call it a release in ISO terms cuz it's available permanently on that specific ISO, whereas users of running Garuda continue to update it through pacman.
Then for users who update daily, it means they already are moving towards the new version and thus on the day you release a new ISO I will be already on that release assuming I update every day.
It's like counting: we start at #1, you release an ISO for #1. A week later I update my packages I am at #2, then later at #4, then etc... and one day, for all the good reasons you mentioned, you feel like #11 is good to be called a new release. You give it a nice name and release an ISO out of it.
I like that very much! And I do update daily.
The Black Arch thing was just a hypothesis in my question, I saw that name on another post and thought it sounded Garuda-like so I decided to use it for the comparison here. lolll I should have replaced it by Imperial Eagle.
).
