Fedora 17 Beta RC4.1 available - what is it? Find out here

[Adam Williamson]

Hi, folks. You may have noticed a 17 Beta RC4.1 directory show up on the
mirror:

http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/17-Beta.RC4.1

and been asking yourself what it is. Well, wonder no more. We built the
live images for Beta RC4 with livecd-tools 17.7, in an attempt to fix
this bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=810104

However, it turns out that the images built with 17.7 still don't boot
properly via EFI when dd'ed (so that bug is not entirely fixed), and the
use of 17.7 actually introduced some other bugs:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=811412
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=811438

So we decided to re-spin just the live images with livecd-tools 17.4
(the build we used to spin all previous composes) and call it RC4.1.
This would give us the opportunity to test both RC4 and 'RC4.1' and
decide which to ship at the Go/No-Go meeting based on the results.

So, the RC4.1 lives have the exact same contents from a package
standpoint as RC4, but are built with the older livecd-tools we used for
all previous composes. I've added a second copy of the 'USB' table to
the installation results page:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_17_Beta_RC4_Install#US...

so we can compare the results from RC4 and RC4.1. So far, a few of us
have confirmed that RC4.1 is back to behaving exactly as RC3 did so far
as USB-written images are concerned, which is what we expected and
should allow us to release it.

Sorry for the fudge, folks...I've added this to the retrospective as
something to improve on in future, I think we just made the wrong call
to use livecd-tools 17.7 for RC4, and that's partly my fault for
suggesting it and +1ing it. I just didn't appreciate that the changes
from 17.4 to 17.7 were significant, the impression I got was that it was
some kind of trivial fix, which turns out not to be the case at all. We
really should have just stuck with 17.4 for RC4.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net