Forgive me if this question is remedial but I’m trying to understand the update process for Rome. I’ve downloaded the lastet znver iso and installed in a VM via Gnome Boxes. 3 days in and I haven’t had an update yet, including the browsers. For instance, on my Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu installs, Firefox is at version 134. On OM Rome it is still at 133.0.3. Chromium is also a bit behind. Are updates delivered in an “all at once” fashion or are specific packages updated individually? Being a rolling release I expected updates to come in rather quickly, a la Arch, Tumbleweed, or Rawhide. I have attempted to search for this but have come up empty thus far so thank you in advance for any assistance in this matter. I am sincerely enjoying OM and I really hope to call it home soon.
It’s a good question. I came from Tumbleweed and seeing how small the team is here, I doubt it will update as quickly as Arch, Tumbleweed, or Rawhide. From what I am seeing, they really need more package maintainers. Having an influx of new people here could change that. 
OpenMandriva has a weird policy of allowing the people best able to make packaging decisions, namely OM developers, to decide. It does not mean the rest of us do not have input, we do. After all this is an all part-time, unpaid, volunteer community. We are all testers.
OMLx workflow is basically Cooker>ROME>Rock.
New stuff is worked on in Cooker our development platform. Then when the project leader and other devs decide that the group of new packages in Cooker are working well and things are as stable and bug free as possible we copy all the new stuff to ROME. We literally copy all the Cooker repositories to ROME. This results in days or weeks with few or no upgrades then maybe, for example, 50 to 300 new packages at once.
Then For Rock the devs and OM Contributor group decide what is in ROME is really doing well now and we do the same. Copy rolling (ROME) repositories to the new version of Rock. Rock does not get many upgrades but we do big fix and critical security upgrades. That is why Rock is mainly for business use and for people that do not like a lot of change.
We can and also do sometimes backport individual packages or package groups (stacks) to ROME or Rock. For example bug fixes, and critical security upgrades. Today we had a user report of qt-creator not starting in ROME so I rebuilt it in Cooker, it worked, so I then backported that to rolling repo.
I hope this wordy answer helps.
So ROME IMO is kinda, sort of, rolling. It does stay pretty up to date and stable.
When we started our rolling repositories we tried the more conventional approach but someone realized this is taking a lot of server time and someone came up with a better approach in terms or using our resources. And we have to be careful how we use our resources as you can see:
@ben79 Thank you very much for the explanation and I completely understand the approach. With such a limited group of volunteers and resources it absolutely makes sense to me why as to why updates are implemented in such a fashion. I’m still weighing the decision as to whether to utilize OM on bare metal but if I chose to do so I will certainly contribute financially as I, most unfortunately, do not have the skills to be of value in a technological sense. Either way, I most certainly appreciate the project and the time it must take each of you to contribute to it.
Should you wish to do so in the future we need help in other areas not just tech stuff. I am strictly user level knowledge myself. Honestly the OM Contributor group is not worth a flip at marketing. Also most or all of us are reluctant to ask for donations. I have to make myself do it.
Understood. I would be more than willing to help in any way possible.
When you feel like doing so go to OM-Chat and start asking/talking. You will figure it out.
No one basically said that ROME is being updated with a 1-month period more or less, as can be seen from here: ROME major upgrade expected 
The more interesting question would be: could updates be skipped or should my ROME be updated every month? 
Yes, I am aware of that thread but it did not clarify if the major upgrades were the only updates coming down. I have no idea why somebody would want to skip a major update.
That is about major upgrades, like copy cooker repos to rolling.
Single packages may (or not) be built for rolling branch when time has come.
Also, usually they go to the relevant /testing repo first, then published to main if deemed working fine.
With regard to this, advanced users may want to join the testers group by enabling the /testing repo and report feedback.
That would be as helpful as packaging or other fields of competence.
I was always interested in knowing that, if you had the resources would ROME be updated like Arch is, i.e. several packages a day? I kinda also like the more “calm” way ROME does it, every month or so as a batch, you basically don’t bother checking for updates, and if something does not work out of the box because there was some updated dependency missing you get a …“notification” from the package manager for it , then you refresh the databases 
In cooker the packages are updated as soon as released upstream.
See abf build list.
This is the first test step. Cooker is not intended as stable by design so breakages is expected there. Developers, and some of us, have cooker system installed on purpose.
We want to take our time to be sure, as much as possible, that everything goes to rolling branch (ROME) is fine.
To sum up, the world ain’t perfect, especially this part:
Yes, managing resources is essential for such a small, unpaid, volunteer group. Would we do anything like disrto X if we could add 6 zeros to that weekly donation amount and hire 3 full time paid developers? Unknown, why even consider it? First we need an evangelist type of fund raiser… Volunteers? Even an ordinary every day fundraiser?
Seriously as we grow we do change.