Social Engineering of Rawhide

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 2/28/06, Charles Curley <charlescurley at charlescurley.com> wrote:

> A good point. How about renaming the repository? "Rawhide" does not
> convey anything about the stability or usefulness of the
> contents. Something like "Unstable" or "Testing" or "BleedingEdge" or
> "UseAtYourOwnRiskDammit" would at least convey something.

1) rawhide is just a nickname at this point. the tree is named
"development" in the mirrors and in the yum configuration files.

2) I very seriously doubt changing thre tree name will change the
word-of-mouth behavior which drives people to imply that the test
releases and the development tree updates are stable.

3)The necessary boiler plate to inform users of the development tree,
exists in the fedora-devel.repo file as a lengthy comment, which no
one will ever actually read.


4) The underlying problem is the average package quality in the
development tree is too good leading up to a final release. This leads
to inflated expectations from novice testers who walk into the ongoing
testing process. They then write personal testimonials of the
stability of the tree, based on their very narrow personal experience,
which mislead other people into thinking the tree will be "stable" for
other people regardless of details in terms of the configuration and
hardware they tested, skewing the expectations of any potential
tester.

5)The solution to the problem of inappropriately high-expectations on
the development tree is obviously to delibrately poison the
development tree on a more regular basis, instead of doing it just
after a final release is out the door. The key to projecting an image
of progress to the unwashed is low expectations.. not higher
standards.  The more broken the development tree feels on a daily
basis, to a tester who isn't fully invested in the true nature of the
development process and wants to continue to falsely believe that
there is an attainable monotonicly increasing ideal of stability which
can be applied to the development tree, the more astonishing a working
final release will appear to them.   I can scream that the development
tree will eat your children and destroy not only your data but your
neighbor's data until I'm blue in the face... but for people who don't
want to hear the warning.. they will choose not to hear the warning...
and the only way for them to learn is to actually have rawhide eat
their data. So i say.. every week there should be a delibrate package
update in the development tree which destroys data. Thrown into the
package pool at random, with an appropriate changelog entry so those
of us who read the daily rawhide reports will know exactly which
package to exclude.


-jef"tough love"spaleta


/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-devel.repo
# These packages are untested and still under development. This
# repository is used for updates to test releases, and for
# development of new releases.
#
# This repository can see significant daily turn over and can see major
# functionality changes which cause unexpected problems with other
# development packages. Please use these packages if you want to work
# with the Fedora developers by testing these new development packages.
#
# fedora-test-list at redhat.com is available as a discussion forum for
# testing and troubleshooting for development packages in conjunction
# with new test releases.
#
# fedora-devel-list at redhat.com is available as a discussion forum for
# testing and troubleshooting for development packages in conjunction
# with developing new releases.
#
# Reportable issues should be filed at bugzilla.redhat.com
# Product: Fedora Core
# Version: devel