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Comment by Nicksil | Hacker News Reader

>the majority of its users (developers) want rolling updates for their tooling.

I haven't met a single software developer who wants this. That's not to say your statement is incorrect -- I have no evidence stating otherwise -- but the idea boggles my mind.

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A huge amount of Linux users use rolling release distributions now (Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, etc). I prefer it as well because I find it less disruptive than occasional big-bang versioned releases.

Where versioning matters, we have better tools than OS package managers now (ex Docker).

I'd much prefer a compromise, like the FreeBSD quarterly updates vs daily, so you can pick the update frequency.

I can't tell you the total number of wasted hours my previous organisation spent upon maintaining MacOS infrastructure after random breakage due to homebrew, but it was a regular occurrence and likely a few hundreds of hours per year for the small setup we looked after, mainly for CI.

I am also in the camp of engineers who prefer stability over bleeding edge. But I do understand folks who prefer the latter modality. If dependencies are gonna break, often its more desirable to have them break quickly with a short remedial cadence to follow. In my own anecdotal experience though, "short" is probably too charitable of a descriptor for the time to fix.

For tools that I develop on I use asdf for versioning. For everything else I want the latest stable version, so homebrew works well.

On Linux I use a rolling release distro for the same effect.

I want rolling updates for my tooling.

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