Re: Managing Fedora Testing
by Jef Spaleta
Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> Schedule would be:
How do you make this schedule work without greatly increasing the
length of time needed for the testing phase?
How does this schedule really take into account the fact the the point
is to track upstream development as much as possible? If fc2
followed this schedule..would we have a 2.6 kernel with selinux or gnome
2.6 in the final fc2 release? A lot of the pieces are moving targets,
does your schedule and the break down really account for that?
Does your schedule really make room for something as disruptive as
the introduction of selinux? How the hell do you split selinux's affect
into a 'domain'? shoehorning selinux support in is sort of a top to
bottom, front to back, side to side, in to out problem.
-jef
20 years, 2 months
su permission failure
by Brent Hills
Hello,
After a fresh installation of Fedora Core II on initial boot I get
Permission denied changing to the /root directory running su -l but I
can change to the directory afterwards:
[bhills@unixtop workarea]$ su -l
Password:
su: warning: cannot change directory to /root: Permission denied
[root@unixtop workarea]# cd /root
[root@unixtop root]#
I assume this is SELinux related but I'm unsure if its a 'problem'?
Brent Hills.
20 years, 2 months
Re: Managing Fedora Testing
by Keith Lofstrom
> Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> > I would put myself in the 45% group, and include many of the folks
> > that are complaining about booting or mirror problems. The Fedora
> > test process seems to be geared exclusively for the 5%. As a
> > result, Fedora will release with less than 10% of the potentially
> > available testing effort, with the remaining effort
> > disproportionally focused.
Jef Spaleta <jspaleta(a)princeton.edu> writes:
> I would sort of agree with that. I would agree that the aggressive
> timescale for testing for fedora core means relying on those 5% (I'd put
> it closer to 1%) to be a strong component of the process. I would also
> say that the dropping of the private betas that rhl use to have makes
> the situation somewhat more dramatic looking than it is. As others have
> said, the fedora testing process, is a more open process than what
> happened with rhl. And more open translates directly into sharper edges
> for the informed to impale themselves on while blundering around in the
> dark.
>
> There is a trade-off here, taking the very long time to do things a
> piece at a time, means the pieces quickly become out of sync with
> upstream development.
...
To reiterate, my concern is that the testing process gets hung up
on the front end, and the distro as a whole is incompletely checked.
I got some feedback, so I will go on to prescription. A "conservative",
one-piece-at-a-time development process is of course much too slow.
Instead, I would divide up the work into domains so that people can
choose a domain and test in that. Where to draw the line is difficult,
but I would probably make the domains "kernel and drivers", "installation
and update", "X and desktops", and "applications". Obviously, many
problems will cross domains, but to the extent that you can partition
things you reduce the scope of most problems.
20 years ago, I designed whole chips. Now I design small pieces of
chips with 10 times as many transistors per piece. Some times my
pieces interact nastily with other pieces, and that can cost a $1M
mask set and 3 months. But 99% of the problems stay confined in my
box, or in the mid-sized box my piece is in. This is how the
processors just keep getting cheaper and faster and better and sooner,
because we can partition the hell out of the problem, and this allows
chip designers to generate terabyte-sized designs really, really fast.
Code right now is partitioned into modules and programs and libraries
and packages, then distros. For those of us interested in testing the
interaction of packages, a single package is too small and a whole
distro is too big. Hence domains. If we have domains A, B, and C, then
testers can work with Anew + Bnew + Cnew if they are in the 5% elite,
but the 70% less-skilled testers can work with Aold + Bold + Cnew if
they just want to look at interactions in that domain. For my four
suggested domains, that suggests 5 test distros rather than one.
It would be wonderful to do all combinations, or even any combination
with any incremental change in any package, but dependencies make that
impractical. In any case, all 5 test distros at alpha are designed
to merge into one distro at beta, probably at test 3.
Schedule would be:
Test 1: Domains defined, new packages in each domain defined.
Find package problems.
Test 2: Packages upgraded/downgraded/replaced to fix package problems.
Find between-package problems within domains.
Test 3: Integrate changed domains into one beta distro.
Find between-domain problems.
Release0: This is it! The complete, perfect distro.
Release1: Just kidding! We fixed those killer bugs.
Release2: We really mean it this time.
Release ...
This will be more work to set up; I would guess 20% more, initially.
But it captures 10x more labor, making more available for
desktop/application testing, which in turn reduces the distractions
for the install/kernel testers. The real question is, do you want to
accomplish 20% testing or 80% testing? I have real concerns that
Fedora Core 2 release, as a coherent distro, will be 20% tested,
because intense application/interaction beta testing will never happen.
If I wanted untested beta code, I would run windows.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl(a)ieee.org Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
20 years, 2 months
kde and xfce
by Gene C.
This is mainly about FC2-T2 x86_64, kde, and xfce. Running kde on FC2-T2 x86
is more or less OK although a bit strange (what in the world are the little
"htt im" window boxes that follow the active window).
OK, this was a fresh install of FC2-T2 on an ASUS SK8V with an Opteron 140. I
have been mostly using gnome/metacity but decided to give kde a try. Oops,
it starts but then doesn't do much (cannot start terminal or do much of
anything but logout). A couple of gray (blank) windows come up also.
I also gave xfce a try and it is pretty much the same ... cannot do anything
but logout.
This is NOT selinux related ... I booted up enforcing=0 (permissive) and it
worked the same way.
Before I spend a lot of time gathering info to report this, is this a known
problem? I assume that there are some people who prefer to run kde out there
and have not seen any messages about this situation so I wonder if it is me
or my hardware that is the problem.
--
Gene
20 years, 2 months
Booting problems probably caused by recording software or kernel
by Jean Francois Martinez
By booting with the CD image from an older Redhat and performing a
mediacheck I noticed the following:
-Two CD/RWs containing the image of CD1 failed at the same place (at
67% of completion), I succeded with a CD/R but the mediacheck became
very slow at, you guessed it, 67% of completion). That CD/R still
refused to boot from the 52x IDE CD reader, but it accepted to boot
from the SCSI CD writer (24x for reading). The above suggests
that something goes wrong around 67% ie two thirds of the CD.
-I also notice that xcdroast does not behave at all as used when
burning a CD: it used to fill its buffer and FIFO and keep them close
to 100%. For the speed, it started relatively slow and went
accelerating. But now the FIFO and buffer are constantly shifting
between 100% and 0%, the machine becomes also completely unresponsive:
echo to keypresses suffers from a notable delay.
The distribution were the recording was done is Redhat 9, xcdroast is
0.98a13-4 built in Jan2003 so it hasn't changed, cdrecord is 2.0 release
11.9.1 and it hasn't moved either. kernel is 2.4.20-30.9 and this one
has changed in Feb2004. The box has an NVIDIA chipset and is using the
nforce driver from NVIDIA along with the nvidia kernel module needed
by the nvidia X driver.
Are the other people who have had boot problems in the same situation
(ie using kernel 2.4.20-30.9 and/or using NVIDIA drivers?
--
Jean Francois Martinez <jfm512(a)free.fr>
20 years, 2 months
FC2T2 rhn-applet-gui
by Will H. Backman
Any reason rhn-applet-gui is taking up so much memory?
Sorting by memory usage in "top" places it between evolutiona and
nautilus.
Anyone else?
20 years, 2 months
FC2T2 Screen Resolution Preferences
by Will H. Backman
If I pick a screen resolution under Gnome Preferences, I will then ask
me if I want to keep the resolution or revert. Selecting "Use previous
resolution" does not revert me back to the original.
Anyone else see this?
Am I creating too much noise? Just say so, and I'll sit on my hands for
a while. I just fear that too many people assume that the developers
see these errors and don't bother to ask.
--
Will Backman <whb(a)ceimaine.org>
Coastal Enterprises, Inc.
20 years, 2 months
SELinux issues (I think) with FC2T2
by Mike Chambers
Ok, after doing a clean install, by creating the first CD and using
linux askmethod via NFS install, so far so good.
But I discovered a couple of things and not sure how to go about this...
1 - When su'ing to root, I get this..
[mike@bart mike]$ su -
Password:
su: warning: cannot change directory to /root: Permission denied
But I can change to /root manually after I get to root, just not
initially on it's own when the su - is issued.
2 - While running mozilla and browsing a directory to import my
bookmarks as normal user, it wouldn't let me view the /home dir unless I
turn off selinux temporarily (it's back on now though).
Do I have to enable/edit something (as in
/etc/security/selinux/src/*something*) to allow me to do this?
Which I am the only user besides the system/root that logs on here,
maybe my username needs admin rights or something?
3 - While trying to start from gnome using redhat/system settings/login
screen, it asks for root password but never starts.
--
Mike Chambers
Madisonville, KY
"It's only funny until someone gets hurt...Then it's hilarious!"
20 years, 2 months
FC2T2 Preferences->Control Center
by Will H. Backman
Gnome, Red Fedora menu, Preferences, Control Center.
Nautilus window comes up and says cannot go to preferences:///
Second time I try it, it brings up nautilus window and spins.
Anyone else get this?
--
Will Backman <whb(a)ceimaine.org>
Coastal Enterprises, Inc.
20 years, 2 months
