Is It Worth Installing F9 Alpha?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:08:32 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:

> > Conclusively, after a few days already, the tester no longer tests F9 Alpha,
> > but a rapidly changing collection of packages. Let's hope this will change
> > with the Beta release and the feature freeze.
> 
> I was never really suggesting that 'Alpha' as a snapshot still needed testing. 

?

> It is a well accepted fact that 'Alpha' is meant as a test of installability 
> more than anything else and nearly all the packages are obsolete for testing 
> purposes a week or two later.

qed.  Together with the cases where the post-Alpha packages get worse,
that is a good example of why testing the Alpha doesn't make much sense.
Even if a pkg in the Alpha worked fine, the next one may be one of the
many infamous version upgrades that spreads wreckage all over the floor.
The terminology (test1 -> test2, or alpha -> beta) doesn't matter much,
if there is no road from the former release to the latter.

The recent F8 kernel update is in the same area. In bodhi it's at karma -6
already, not counting anonymous users. The first tester there gave it +1
although he had to delete/reconfig his network profiles (which probably
was the same bug that hit me and killed the network).

> F9 Development does however, need the testing, 

Then make it more tester-friendly.

> Just because there is a new build of a package doesn't mean a report against a 
> prior build is a waste of time either, it just means you have something to check 
> in the future (whether it is fixed). 

Exactly that *is* a waste of resources.

> You report it, you check later after you 
> update, if its still there then the developer knows about it early, if its not 
> still there you close your own bug.

... and open a new one, because the version upgrade (re-)introduces bugs.