Trying to install rawhide: madness and where do we hope to go ?

[Daniel Veillard]

  I would like to debug the inotify problem found on head, try to add 
V4L2 support for pwlib and work on Xen setup. For this I need a Rawhide
install, this sounds simple and resinstalling a rawhide used to be a copy
of the image boot to an USB key, use quickstart to point to a local
mirror and in 20 mn have a new setup ready to work on. I really didn't
expected to face the following mess:

  First trying the installer, I have a local copy of the rawhide mirror,
any attempt to bout from the boot image results in anaconda failing
not able to import os or sys at the python level, i.e. not the kind of
bug you can work around by yourself if you're not intimate with anaconda:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Running anaconda, the Fedora Core system installer - please wait
Could not find platform independant libraries <prefix>
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Traceback (most recent call last)
  File "/usr/bin/anaconda", line 28, in ?
    import sys, os
ImportError: no module named os
installer exited abnormally
---------------------------------------------------------------------

  it had been that way for months, general feedback is installer does
not work, and that the expected way is to upgrade from a FC4 setup.
  So okay it's takes way more time but I reinstall a FC4 partition from
scratch, then modify the yum.conf to point to my local rawhide repository.
I upgrade yum, I upgrade the kernel and one hours and a half later I try
to reboot. Dies as all init level respawns too fast. 2.6.13-1.1538_FC5 won't
boot but the old 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 still allows to boot.
  So okay one may need to update everything yum update launched....
Which means a transaction with 510 packages and 881 megabytes of data which 
are downloaded *first* onto the local disk before even starting to test the
transaction. 15 mn later I'm greeted with:
  ('installing package openoffice.org-writer-1.9.127-1.2.0.fc5 needs 764MB on the / filesystem', (9, '/', 800161792L))

  Of course downloading all packages locally, plus keeping them for the
entire transaction, plus the conservative (good) rpm checks for disk space
means one need 2 Gigabyte free on the partition (and this is far far from
a full install) to just run the upgrade.

  So removing a bunch of beefy packages, I regain enough space on the partition
to get the transaction to start. 954 packages to be updated/cleaned, the
transaction took 35 minutes.

  Then reboot ... 2.6.13-1.1538_FC5 still fails to boot all process forked
by init just seems to crash, but booting the old 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 works.
Half a day later I still don't have a setup to test inotify or recent Xen.

  Do we really expect to get significant feedback on a system that is so
hard to install or run ? Delaying the release of FC5 raises the risk of
decoupling from our user base and people who test bleeding edge, with a
HEAD that is so hard to install and get running people who want to test
new stuff have an easier upgrade path by installing Ubuntu (and maybe
openSuse) than trying to get Rawhide going. I am afraid the current state
of Rawhide just means silent exodus of the people who really help building
the distro. The fact that the installer has been broken for months in my
experience is a very significant threat, and increase the risk associated
to delaying FC5 to an extend we didn't anticipated. 

  In a nutshell I'm very concerned that Rawhide being nearly impossible to
install or run by mere mortals the delay between FC4 and FC5 will just
result in loosing a large part of our user base to other distro more 
up to date and still easy to install and run.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/