RawhideBlocker [was Re: QA group activities + goals discussion]

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 12:59 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 18:18:13 +0000,
>   Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 14:38 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > 
> > > 1. Increase participation in Rawhide: it provides a huge benefit in
> > > terms of identifying issues and having them fixed quickly and early in
> > > the cycle.
> > 
> > Agreed - rawhide has a bad rep, and lots of people tend to avoid it. It
> > has been improving lately, but we should keep trying out new things to
> > get it to the stage that anyone involved in Fedora development should be
> > able to run rawhide.
> 
> You really need to know what you are doing if you want to track rawhide.
> For example just an hour ago I rebooted after updating to today's rawhide
> and the boot failed. Because I had been reading about issues with mdadm
> and rules files and the problem was with raid arrays I was able to guess
> that moving one of the mdadm rules files out of the way might fix things
> and lo and behold that worked. This is not something I would expect a
> normal user to be able to easily do.
> This kind of thing usually happens to me a couple of times between alpha
> and the release.

> And this doesn't include the KMS issues this (and the previous) cycle. They
> are easier to deal with, but you still need to know about it. Perhaps this
> isn't typical of most rawhide cycles, but similar things will no doubt
> happen in future rawhide cycles.

Sure. Stuff breaks in development branches. This is why all instructions
relating to Rawhide specifically state that you should install it on a
test system, test partition, or test virtual machine. So that when it
breaks you can shrug and go 'oh, well' rather than screaming and going
'NOOOOoooo, my precious work!'

We're not really talking about 'normal users' running Rawhide, anyway.
We're talking about people who are interested in helping improve release
quality and testing bleeding-edge code, who can at least work a text
editor from a console, and have the flexibility to understand that
Rawhide stuff *will* break occasionally and they'll have to work around
it.

The point is that this pool of people is in fact far larger than the
number of people who currently run Rawhide. It should at least include
the vast majority of packagers, yet from what I've seen, it seems that a
lot of Fedora packagers only run stable releases, which is a pretty
reliable indicator that we really could have more people running
Rawhide.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net