Fedora and Rawhide

[Oscar A. Valdez]

In the future, will Rawhide be "compatible" with current Fedora
releases?
-- 
Oscar A. Valdez

(Just trying to be better informed, that's all)

[Emmanuel Seyman]

On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 05:32:39PM -0600, Oscar A. Valdez wrote:
>  In the future, will Rawhide be "compatible" with current Fedora
>  releases? 
Rawhide will be the developement version of Fedora so yes.

Emmanuel

[William Hooper]

Emmanuel Seyman said:
>  On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 05:32:39PM -0600, Oscar A. Valdez wrote:
> >
> > In the future, will Rawhide be "compatible" with current Fedora
> > releases?
>
>  Rawhide will be the developement version of Fedora so yes. 
And subject to major breakage at times, just like always.

Rawhide has never been anything but testing for the next version.

-- 
William Hooper

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Oscar A. Valdez wrote:

> In the future, will Rawhide be "compatible" with current
> Fedora
> releases? 
Simple answer:  No.

Longer answer:  Rawhide is a public snapshot of the constantly 
moving and changing internal software builds at Red Hat of what 
will eventually become the next OS release.  It has always been 
this, and current plans are to continue this.  At some point in 
time changes will start getting into the tree which are no doubt 
incompatible with Fedora Core 1.  That will be very intentional.  
Not intentional in the sense of "break compatibility" but 
intentional as in "proceed with development".  Some of these 
incompatibilities of course will be temporary and randomly coming 
and going, whereas others will be permanent due to new technology 
inclusion, packaging incompatibilities and many other factors.

Of course, wherever possible, we try to avoid unnecessary 
incompatibilites, but that isn't always possible either.

Basically, don't treat or use rawhide as your official "updates
for Fedora Core 1" location or you very much will get horribly
burned in a couple of weeks, perhaps a month or not long after
that, when major changes go into the tree.  Treat Rawhide with
caution, because rawhide has absolutely zero QA testing done on
it, and is essentially "this package built, cool".  In many cases
that package will work fine.  In other cases it wont work at all.  
In other cases it will stop other packages from working too.  In
worse cases, it will break your system, requiring some nasty
trickery to get things back in order.  In even worse cases it
will trash your system completely and possibly destroy some or
all of your data.  There are never any guarantees using rawhide,
and probably never will be because we need a place to "just build
stuff" and to "find out what breaks" and that is what becomes
rawhide.

It's even possible that rawhide could physically damage your 
hardware, because the software is totally untested, and there are 
various bad things that can occur in untested video drivers, 
kernel drivers, etc.

Does this mean people trash their systems every 5 minutes when 
using Rawhide?  No, but it does mean that that is very possible, 
and to be aware of it and not ever use rawhide on production 
systems.

Just remember...  caveat emptor.  ;o)

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat

[Gerry Tool]

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 18:22, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>  On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Oscar A. Valdez wrote:
>  
>  >In the future, will Rawhide be "compatible" with current Fedora
>  >releases?
>  
>  Simple answer:  No.
>  
>  Longer answer:  Rawhide is a public snapshot of the constantly 
>  moving and changing internal software builds at Red Hat of what 
>  will eventually become the next OS release.  It has always been 
>  this, and current plans are to continue this.  At some point in 
>  time changes will start getting into the tree which are no doubt 
>  incompatible with Fedora Core 1.  That will be very intentional.  
>  Not intentional in the sense of "break compatibility" but 
>  intentional as in "proceed with development".  Some of these 
>  incompatibilities of course will be temporary and randomly coming 
>  and going, whereas others will be permanent due to new technology 
>  inclusion, packaging incompatibilities and many other factors.
>  
>  Of course, wherever possible, we try to avoid unnecessary 
>  incompatibilites, but that isn't always possible either.
>   
During Fedora Test, rawhide has been used in a slightly new fashion to
provide updates for testing via a channel in up2date.  This has probably
created an anticipation that updates will continue to be supplied in
this way.  What do we switch to for update channels once Fedora Core 1
is released?

I will probably answer the question myself by noting that the most
recent updates have changed the up2date channel designation to two
channels called "fedora-core-1" and "updates-released."  Will these
channels now have a distinct set of updates different from rawhide?

Thanks.

Gerry

[Bill Nottingham]

Gerry Tool (gstool(a)earthlink.net) said: 
>  During Fedora Test, rawhide has been used in a slightly new fashion
> to
>  provide updates for testing via a channel in up2date.  This has probably
>  created an anticipation that updates will continue to be supplied in
>  this way.  What do we switch to for update channels once Fedora Core 1
>  is released?
>  
>  I will probably answer the question myself by noting that the most
>  recent updates have changed the up2date channel designation to two
>  channels called "fedora-core-1" and "updates-released."  Will these
>  channels now have a distinct set of updates different from rawhide? 
Correct.

fedora-core-1 is the base OS, and updates-released is, well, updates.

Bill

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 21:58, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  Gerry Tool (gstool(a)earthlink.net) said: 
>  > During Fedora Test, rawhide has been used in a slightly new fashion to
>  > provide updates for testing via a channel in up2date.  This has probably
>  > created an anticipation that updates will continue to be supplied in
>  > this way.  What do we switch to for update channels once Fedora Core 1
>  > is released?
>  > 
>  > I will probably answer the question myself by noting that the most
>  > recent updates have changed the up2date channel designation to two
>  > channels called "fedora-core-1" and "updates-released."  Will
> these
>  > channels now have a distinct set of updates different from rawhide?
>  
>  Correct.
>  
>  fedora-core-1 is the base OS, and updates-released is, well, updates. 
It would probably not be far off the mark, then, to expect that when
FC2-test1 is ready, there will be a downloadable distro (ISO, Fedora
tree) to try, which would be updated by the testers from Rawhide, until
testing is complete and FC2 goes gold. In other words, pretty much what
has happened during the FC1 test period. Correct?

-- 
Paul W. Frields <paul(a)frields.com&gt;

[Bill Nottingham]

Paul W. Frields (paul(a)frields.com) said: 
>  It would probably not be far off the mark, then, to expect that when
>  FC2-test1 is ready, there will be a downloadable distro (ISO, Fedora
>  tree) to try, which would be updated by the testers from Rawhide, until
>  testing is complete and FC2 goes gold. In other words, pretty much what
>  has happened during the FC1 test period. Correct? 
Basically, yes. rawhide will be the update channel for test releases,
unless we come up with something better.

Bill

[Noah Silva [Mailing list]]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Bill Nottingham wrote:

>  Basically, yes. rawhide will be the update channel for test
> releases,
>  unless we come up with something better. 
But if we have a FC1T3 machine we are budating from rawhide now, and then
we want to stick with FC1 final, we can change the channel name to
"Fedora-core-1" some time soon?

(I immagine this as I am using debian testing and it's just gone stable,
and I want to stay on that release, to get bug fixes, etc., I would change
from "testing" to "Sid" (or whatever)).

 -- noah silva

[Bill Nottingham]

Noah Silva [Mailing list] (nsilva-list(a)aoi.atari-source.com) said: 
>  > Basically, yes. rawhide will be the update channel for test
> releases,
>  > unless we come up with something better.
>  
>  But if we have a FC1T3 machine we are budating from rawhide now, and then
>  we want to stick with FC1 final, we can change the channel name to
>  "Fedora-core-1" some time soon? 
See the sources files shipped with current up2date, or the yum.conf
in current yum.

Bill

[Noah Silva [Mailing list]]

>  See the sources files shipped with current up2date, or the yum.conf
>  in current yum. 
Are there any plans to have the configuration be less redundant?  Right
now, I try to make double sure to keep the yum and up2date "sources" file
in synch.  Perhaps up2date could just use the yum config file for yum
sources (maybe redhat could collaborate with yum's authors to extend the
conf file directives a bit if needed). - just an idea.

(I was thinking about writing a utility that would copy [and convert
into the appropriate format] the yum lines from up2date into a yum.conf
file... then I could just modify up2date's file, and have both kept in
synch).

 -- noah silva