Re: Are 3.6.x release candidates useful to find bugs?

[Charalampos Stratakis]

----- Original Message -----
>  From: "Petr Viktorin" <pviktori(a)redhat.com&gt;
>  To: "Fedora Python SIG" <python-devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
>  Sent: Monday, May 21, 2018 1:39:41 PM
>  Subject: Are 3.6.x release candidates useful to find bugs?
>  
>  Hello!
>  
>  At PyCon US 2018, Łukasz Langa, the release manager for Python 3.7, told
>  me that he'd like to collect data about Release Candidates for point
>  releases (3.x.y). The idea is that if these aren't being tested and
>  aren't revealing bugs, it would make sense to stop releasing them.
>  
>  So, please, if you find any bugs in upcoming Python *3.6.x* release
>  candidates, let me know (or write to Łukasz directly)! If there are no
>  such reports, there will be no 3.7.x RCs.
>  
>  Also, are these useful for Fedora? Do/should we test 3.x.y RCs?
>  (3.x.0 pre-releases like the current 3.7.0 beta are a different matter;
>  those are obviously useful.)
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>   
Haven't thought that angle before thanks for bringing it up. Indeed we test the RC
releases of a new major release (e.g. 3.7) as it helps catching bugs early on,
but we've never done that for point releases, as those updates do not usually pose any
major issues. Of course there have been bugs for which in most cases we backport
the fix from the next point release.

So I see two potential outcomes here. Either we change our procedures on updating the
point releases and we test the RC ones as well, or we can just say to upstream that from
Fedora's POV we don't really bother with the rc point releases. I'm more
inclined towards the second option, as the first one is highly dependent on the
workload/free cycles
at that particular time frame, and combined with the short window between an RC and the
actual release, it could strain a lot of resources for not much of a benefit.

I'd like some more opinions on the matter of course.

-- 
Regards,

Charalampos Stratakis
Software Engineer
Python Maintenance Team, Red Hat