Poor first time experience for potential contributors interested in release validation

[Jonathan Watt]

I originally reported this issue at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1862703 but was asked to re-report it here:

I was using whatcanidoforfedora.org to see what areas I could contribute to. I selected "Validate Releases" and it took me to the QA wiki:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join#release-validation

That section says:

For information on getting and installing pre-releases, see <this page>.

where "this page" links to:

https://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

However, navigating to that page gives the message:

This page is outdated!
  You will be redirected to:

https://getfedora.org/

That general getfedora.org page doesn't seem to be applicable for directing potential testers on how to test pre-releases.

Maybe this could be fixed?

[Kamil Paral]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 5:16 AM Jonathan Watt  wrote:
> I originally reported this issue at
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1862703 but was asked to
> re-report it here:
>
> I was using whatcanidoforfedora.org to see what areas I could contribute
> to. I selected "Validate Releases" and it took me to the QA wiki:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join#release-validation
>
> That section says:
>
> For information on getting and installing pre-releases, see <this page>.

Actually, it's in this section:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join#Testing_Fedora_pre-releases
where it talks about Alpha and Beta releases. And since we have none for
F33 yet, the get-prerelease page is empty. At least I hope it will come
alive again once we have a Beta compose (Alphas are no longer produced).
The wording could be improved regarding this, yes.

What is applicable right now is Rawhide testing, release validation testing
(on Rawhide) and test days. We'll be branching F33 from Rawhide during the
next week or so, I believe, so then it will become F33 testing instead of
Rawhide testing.

As Ben said in Bugzilla, the best place to talk about this is the test list
[1] (this is not the test list), or you can create tickets for us in our
tracker [2].

Thanks for your interest in helping us!

[1]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]/
[2] https://pagure.io/fedora-qa

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2020-08-06 at 03:16 +0000, Jonathan Watt wrote:
> I originally reported this issue at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1862703 but was asked to re-report it here:
>
> I was using whatcanidoforfedora.org to see what areas I could contribute to. I selected "Validate Releases" and it took me to the QA wiki:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join#release-validation
>
> That section says:
>
> For information on getting and installing pre-releases, see <this page>.
>
> where "this page" links to:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
>
> However, navigating to that page gives the message:
>
> This page is outdated!
>   You will be redirected to:
>
> https://getfedora.org/
>
> That general getfedora.org page doesn't seem to be applicable for directing potential testers on how to test pre-releases.
>
> Maybe this could be fixed?

Thanks for reporting this, and sorry for the trouble!

The section had got a bit stale indeed. Before getfedora.org existed,
the get-prerelease URL always had some useful content even when no
current pre-release was available, but now things are a bit different.
I have revised the text on the page to link directly to getfedora.org
with some wording explaining that it'll mention a Beta release whenever
a current one is available. I took out all references to Alphas since
we don't have them any more. I also updating the "Developing tools"
section a bit while I was in there. :)

Thanks again!