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

[John Poelstra]

Luis Villa wrote:
> 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
> 

This is a great discussion.  I had the same experience with the wiki.

When I first became more involved in Fedora I was constantly confused by 
the terms "development" and "rawhide".  Sometimes they seemed to be the 
same thing and other times they weren't.  The classic use case was 
someone with lots of experience telling others to "go get that from 
'rawhide'" which really meant to get it from in the "development" repo, 
but they always left the last part out.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say "I'm running 'development'" when 
answering the question of which release they are running.  They usually 
say they are running "rawhide".

Is there a way to close on this and change the name as most here seem in 
favor of?

I'm guessing changing the name of the "development" repo to "rawhide" 
could cause more confusion at the mirrors and in /etc/yum.repos.d/.  How 
big of problem is this and are there any big reasons not to change 
"development" to "rawhide"?  Worth targeting for F8?

John