old TCs/RCs downloads - do you need them?

Kamil Paral kparal at redhat.com
Mon Apr 16 16:07:33 UTC 2012


Usually all the old test and release composes are available there:

http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/

Recently it was wiped clean. After a few people asked on #fedora-admin, the latest composes were added back. However, there seems to be a policy to delete all old composes (even the latest ones) once a milestone is declared GOLD. It means the gold composes are unavailable for several days until they are officially published.

The rationale for this policy was bandwidth/storage concerns and (quoting dgilmore) 'to build up anticipation for the release'. The first part doesn't seem to apply anymore, at least if I understood nirik correctly.

I'd like to ask people to voice their opinions on that policy. Do you have some use cases where you would still use the old and latest composes, or do you not need them?

I'd like RelEng team to keep all the composes until Fedora Branched is Final (if technically possible) and I'd like to have some more use cases as an argument than just my personal opinions (maybe I just failed to explain them properly on #fedora-admin, so you might be more convincing).

Use cases I see:
1. Old TCs/RCs benefit QA team because we can do regression testing (find out in which compose a bug first appeared).
2. Latest RCs benefit Test Days owners, they can use them instead of building their own or relying on nightlies (often broken). If we delete them, Test Days around Alpha/Beta milestones will have a hard time.
3. Bug reports often reference certain TC/RC, so their availability might help developers find a problem (if I say I see it broken on RC3 Live, it's easier to reproduce for the developer than if I see it on my installed system - every installed system is different).
4. If I haven't stored the latest ISOs locally, I can't test and report many bugs for which that particular install media is required. Removing them just to build up anticipation hurts quality.

Thoughts?


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