Update/install experience

[Seth Vidal]

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Paul W. Frields wrote:

> Jumping in because it's a topic of great interest for me, even though
> I'm not deeply involved in daily QA work.  QA folks, forgive me if I
> go astray or misrepresent anything.
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 04:48:38PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>> On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:06:33 -0500
>> Will Woods <wwoods at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>> Who is testing them "as a single unit" ?
>>>
>>> Anyone who's interested in testing updates or getting early access to
>>> new fixes and features. Collectively referred to as "QA". I'm sure
>>> you've heard of us?
>>
>> Sure. :)
>>
>> I am just worried that this is a "well, everyone will jump in and test"
>> type of thing. If they aren't doing so now, how does this setup
>> increase QA folks? Or you think the current folks in QA will be able to
>> test all updates in the flow if it was just organized a bit better?

>
> Problems in the help channels sometimes come down to users having to
> run 'rpm -q <bunches_o'_stuff>' because when you ask "What Fedora are
> you running?" the answer isn't all that helpful starting a few weeks
> after release day.


Actually yum may be able to help with that, now.

The 'yum version' command allows us to setup groups of pkgs to query and 
produce a checksum that can be easily compared. It'd be possible to check 
a base set of pkgs to see if they match up to what is useful for testing.

from the docs:

version
          Produces a "version" of the rpmdb, and of the enabled reposito-
         ries if "all" is given as the first argument. You can also spec-
         ify version groups in the version-groups config. file. If you
         pass -v, for verbose mode, more information is listed. The ver-
         sion is calculated by taking a sha1 hash of the packages (in
         sorted order), and the checksum_type/checksum_data entries from
         the yumdb. Note that this rpmdb version is now also used signif-
         icantly within yum (esp. in yum history).


-sv