rawhide and Fedora QA [was Re: why I'm using Ubuntu instead of Fedora ATM]

[Luis Villa]

On 6/10/07, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at atrpms.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 11:47:04PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > Returning to an old rant, where I described some of the reasons I was
> > still using Ubuntu:[1]
> >
> > On 1/3/07, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
> > >* QA: Ubuntu aggressively pushes people to use their development
> > >branch and report problems, which leads to better, more stable final
> > >releases. At the time I chose to use Ubuntu, people were not just not
> > >encouraged, but actively discouraged from using rawhide. This is
> > >improving...
> >
> > When I went looking for rawhide information tonight, I found it
> > impossible to find, so maybe I take back what I said about the
> > situation improving :/ Try googling for 'fedora rawhide', or 'rawhide
> > site:fedoraproject.org' and see what you get.
> >
> > What is up with that? I ask here because it could be a web or
> > marketing team problem (page exists, but needs SEO love) or because it
> > could be a QA team problem (page forgotten about?[2] page not deemed
> > to be required?)
>
> The term rawhide stems from before Fedora (Core). During Fedora Core 1
> and later there was a marketing effort to rename it to development. So
> any rawhide references have been officially changed to development.
>
> But rawhide is such a persistant name that it just doesn't fade away :)

If someone tried to get rid of it four years ago(!), and I still see
references to it hourly in IRC and right on the main wiki Testing
page, then yes, the effort to get rid of it failed.

> ... Just look for "development" instead of "rawhide" in the wiki.

'fedora development' is ungoogleable/unsearchable, and will always be
unless people stop doing 'fedora development', so this is a waste of
my time.

Aside from it being ungoogleable, that still doesn't solve my problem-
manually checking pages that should reference 'development' don't in
fact reference it.

For example:

> > [2] free tip: on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA rawhide should be
> > more prominent than, say, CLAs. CLAs don't help find bugs. Also, it
> > would help if rawhide were mentioned *at all*. :)

No mention there about where to find/how to install 'development.'

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Development : No mention of how to
actually get to the packages that are under development.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraTesting : No mention of how to
actually get to the packages that are under development.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Testing : at least a mention that such
packages exist. It even says rawhide (oops). Forgets to mention *how
to get them*, though. Oops.

So, again, maybe this information is somewhere, but it is ungoogleable
and unfindable, at least to a mildly persistent person like me.

(And don't get me started on thl's 'we still say it eats babies'
email. I thought surely it was widely understood by now that a
development tree that is believed to regularly eat babies is a bad
thing? Yes, it needs warnings, but if no one runs it until test 3
you'll always have this last minute crush of critical bugs that should
have been possible to discover and prioritize much earlier.)

Luis