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For those that don't know (some on this page don't, it seems), Arch, Gentoo, FreeBSD(-STABLE and -CURRENT), and others already do this.

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Yes, and it seems that they don't customize the packages as Ubuntu does (Arch does not for sure and that's one of the reasons I'm using it).

So I really wonder how Ubuntu will pull that off (rolling release of customized packages?!)

Well, the way ubuntu does it is they customize their packages and put them in the tag for the next release. Presumably, this means they'll just put them in the stable release repositories instead.

This isn't entirely true, Arch still has custom patches for certain packages and some undergo a decent bit of customization before getting pushed out.

The biggest difference with Ubuntu (and Debian) is that they vet the packages for a much longer period of time and have a whole lot of politicking and red tape involved in getting the packages even pushed into the unstable / proposed repository.

Just to clarify: i know Arch does some customization, but certainly not as much as Ubuntu. Arch also heavily relies on configuration files while I rarely edited a config file in Ubuntu. Presumably, it takes a longer time to adapt the GUI config tools in Ubuntu when new options are introduced.

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