Ready for new RPM version?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 15:57 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:

> > Chicken and egg situation. Someone has to take the leap.
> 
> Sure. I'll let someone who's not using a VPN, email, or anything
> involving passwords and tokens they care about do that. Meanwhile, I'll
> use something that's got signed packages for my daily stuff.

I replied about the signed packages thing in the other thread fork,
please don't cross-pollute. :)

> > Eventually,
> > once enough developers are on Rawhide, there'll be a culture where
> > people generally don't break things too egregiously, and are immediately
> > complained-at if they do, workarounds become known, fixes are made
> > quickly. But anyhoo, I have more developed thoughts along these lines
> > coming in future.
> 
> I go through phases of thinking this, but then I wonder how that gels
> with having the ability to be the playground of the latest and greatest
> technology, which is when I realize that the two are incompatible.

It's not, really. Fedora's is the only development branch which is so
neglected, no other distro's is. To give the example I'm most familiar
with, Mandriva's development branch has, this cycle, gone through a
complete rebuild, Python 2.5 -> 2.6 migration, Tcl 8.5 -> 8.6 migration,
X server 1.4 -> 1.6 (git snapshot then final release) migration, and a
few other major changes. Most developers run it, as do quite a lot of
testers, and it generally works. (While the Python 2.6 rebuild was going
on, if you tried to upgrade, you'd see about four hundred errors. This
was a fairly good clue that you should wait until the rebuild was
complete before updating. Most people are able to handle this level of
cogitation.)

I ran it on my production system for four years without it causing me
any unavoidable problems.

So far I've been running Rawhide for a few weeks, similarly without any
unavoidable problems. Early days, but I suspect Rawhide's reputation for
kitten consumption to be somewhat inflated. I certainly don't think it's
impossible to have a situation where we can work on Exciting New Stuff
but still have a development branch which mostly works for most of the
people most of the time.

> > > KVM is great at letting one poke safely at stuff.
> > 
> > Sure, but nothing beats hardware. =)
> 
> I disagree. Only time that even makes a difference is if you're using
> some specific gadget you can't pass through, or actually have some
> specific hardware you need to test - granted, actual testing should
> happen outside of VMs, but for much of userland stuff, it makes
> absolutely no difference. Even sound passthrough works now :P

Sure, works, but you're not really testing the underlying hardware. We
need to know if Rawhide changes are causing problems for video cards,
sound cards, network adapters and so on.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net