Stable Release Updates types proposal

[Terry Barnaby]

On 18/03/10 19:18, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 12:57 +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
>
>> As part of a Fedora release I would have thought that part of the
>> test schedule would be to load and view some test documents with
>> openoffice on a set number of platforms (Different graphics chipsets).
>> This would likely have picked this up ...
>
> Ahh. Idealism. :)
>
> No, we are nowhere near this. We only implemented any kind of desktop
> testing for the F13 cycle. Prior to F13, there was no planned validation
> testing of anything besides the installer.
>
> More generally, we consider it acceptable to release Fedora with known
> regressions in functionality where this is ultimately required to drive
> development forward. QA and devel groups know very well that some
> AMD/ATI adapters behave worse in F10 onwards than they did in F9 and
> earlier (though they tend to be better in F13 than F12, and better in
> F12 than F11). This is due to extensive architecture changes in the
> driver which were considered necessary to support new and future
> hardware properly, and implement new models like Gallium.

Although I understand Fedora's frontier status, I think the graphics
system changes could probably have been handled better. After the kernel and
core shared libraries the graphics system is probably the next essential
core OS subsystem (At least for desktop systems). It seems most of peoples
stability issues with fedora stem from graphics. I do understand the
difficulty with the multitude of different graphics chipsets out there. But
this is where Fedora could shine with its close links to upstream development. 
It would have been good to be very upfront with this and get a group to
define and setup some basic graphics tests and loudly promote users to
perform tests with these both pre-release and post-release. This with a
website with test status versus graphics board/chipsets and with good
easy linkages to Bugzilla (more user friendly) and perhaps a separate
graphics-testing repository to keep quick graphics updates away from
the "stable" release etc. If enough upstream developers, Fedora packagers
and testing users were in on this I think great inroads into getting stable
and good graphics systems would be made in a relatively short time.

Some more Idealism :)