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:
