Is It Worth Installing F9 Alpha?

[Andrew Farris]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> F9 Alpha at least installed and seemed to work at first, but still was
> very slow at run-time. And with a high number of updates waiting to be
> downloaded, testing is useless. I test something only to find out the next
> upgrade breaks it already. I test something, and if I find a bug, I'm
> asked to update from rawhide. As a tester, I'm either too fast or too late
> with finding/reporting problems. Meanwhile I need to fiddle with broken
> deps in the single repository which affect ordinary yum installs of
> package-chains needed for test-compiling software. Fine if the primary
> spin is free of broken deps, but the repository is broken.

yum --skip-broken, occasionally an --exclude=brokenstuff, and there should be no 
problem staying current unless you've got a slower downstream connection.  I 
realize that would be an extreme barrier to keeping up when some days have huge 
updates and other days have very few (meaning even a throttled download all day 
won't really help you stay current).

> One of the sporadic runs of "yum update" took more than three hours to
> update 700 pkgs. And one of the update pkgs killed X, which means it ends
> at a black screen when trying to start gdm or startx. It might be possible
> to "fix" it with a fresh xorg.conf. But why even try that? F9 development
> is a fast-moving target, known to be incomplete, known to be broken in
> several areas, with no signs of a base that justifies efforts of testing
> it.

Thats not very accurate.. there is plenty of justification for testing it -- 
there is just a different kind of testing needed.  Things are broken, *very* 
broken, so how can that not need testing?  There is good reason for an 
Alpha/Beta distinction, and there should be a different expectation, and 
different type of testing going on between them.  Major breakage requires major 
testing.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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