Testing test releases: do not update

[Mike A. Harris]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Ernest L. Williams Jr. wrote:

>> >> I think that Robert Day's initial point is correct. If there is no
>> >> stable baseline then testers are constantly finding superficial bugs;
>> >> deep bugs that take hours of testing will never get reached. Alan Cox is
>> >> also right when he states that a tester should check against the current
>> >> state of rawhide before he reports a bug.
>> >
>> >the more i read posted on this, the more i'm coming to sort of
>> >understand the other positions so, yes, i'm starting to
>> >understand the philosophy of, this early in the release process,
>> >just drive all of the changes out there and see what breaks.
>> 
>> That's how it has been for 10 years.  I'm not sure why some
>> people think the processes that have been used all this time are
>> all of a sudden bad.  Perhaps people just do not understand the 
>> procedures and what to expect.
>That is true.
>However, is there not a Fedora 2 Test-l updates tree?  IF there is then
>Testers should use that, right??

rawhide is the updates tree for any and all test releases.  All 
new packages go into rawhide always, which are newer than 
whatever the last released test release was.  Testers should use 
rawhide, and only test packages that they are comfortable 
accepting the fact that the given package might be totally broken 
and unuseable and may even destroy data or damage the OS 
installation requiring a total reinstallation from scratch.



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat