Ready for new RPM version?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 14:19 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 16:39 -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > That said, I've been running rawhide on basically all of my boxes all
> > the time without a need for a reinstall[1] for a decade later this
> > year!
> > :-)
> 
> and the counter example is trying to run rawhide, have a day without
> email working.  Have a day without the system booting, have a day
> without the wireless working, so on and so forth.  Those days add up
> quickly when it's your critical functionality that breaks.
> 
> Making it harder to make those things break just means we wind up with
> rawhide, and rawerhide where the real changes are made, and the whole
> process repeats itself.
> 
> Sure, I'd love more people to use rawhide, and I'd love rawhide to break
> less often, but you're not going to win any favors by convincing
> developers to use rawhide and then not hear from them for a few days
> because all their communication software just broke.

Email breaking is rather unlikely. I don't think there's many people
left who keep all their actual email in a single client and cross their
fingers that it won't break. Everyone uses some kind of remote server -
mostly, let's face it, GMail these days (though die-hards like me are
still running their own IMAP server, or using their ISP's, or
something). In that case you can usually use any one of several dozen
client apps to access your email, or the web interface.

How often does Rawhide really fail to boot? I mean, really? So bad that
you can't fix it with a single kernel parameter or booting last week's
kernel or something? This is part of the reputation inflation thing I'm
wondering about. It just doesn't match my experience of dev branches.

This system's wireless. Been through a dozen kernel updates and it
hasn't broken yet. Didn't break on Mandriva the whole time I was running
that. And, hey, if the native driver breaks - you've always got
ndiswrapper. Flexibility.

Look, obviously dev branches are always going to be less stable and
break more often than stable releases, so obviously there's consequently
people who really need to run stable releases. Some of these people are
developers. I just remain unconvinced that it's really the case that
everyone who could sensibly run Rawhide, already is. I continue to
believe that we could have a lot more people - both developers and
testers - running Rawhide on *some* system at least, and this would
improve the quality of Rawhide and hence of releases.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net