FC4 state of affairs and FC5

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Sep 7 17:15:33 UTC 2005


On 9/7/05, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/7/05, Paul A Houle <ph18 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> >     I don't really know how bad the problems are.  Most of the codepath
> > involved in the install is going to be on the CD and not on the rpms.
> > Most of the rpms are getting 'tested' by people who are running
> > up2date.
> 
> anaconda has "magic"..voodoo magic. Perhaps its best not to assume
> that up2date and anaconda treat depresolution equally.
> 
> The main questions I see are
> >
> > (i) will something about the rpms cause the installer to malfunction?
> > (ii) will something go wrong during firstboot...  this is the one code
> > path that isn't getting tested daily by Fedora users.
> >
> >     Careful software engineering can minimize the codepath affected by
> > (i) and (ii) problems and reduce the chance of problems.
> 
> careful software engineering certaintly sounds like manpower to me.
> Who exactly is going to be watching out for this? Someone is going to
> actually have to do the testing and catch problems. Especially if the
> goal is to respin to fix install time problems. Anytime you go into
> the code to fix something you can break something...regardless of how
> "careful" your software engineering is. If there isn't the manpower to
> do the testing after a change in made.. you end up with a situation
> where people having problems unique to a respin. Its hard enough
> helping people through well understood cornercase installer problems
> with the release isos 2 months after a release. You start throwing
> monthly isos out there without serious regression testing and you get
> into deeply uncomparable situations. I'm certaintly not going to stick
> my neck out and attempt to help people with a respin that I havent
> used. And I'm certaintly not going to be doing weekly or monthly
> respin based installs on top of tracking rawhide I don't have the
> hardware to keep up with that.
> 
> >     A less ambitious goal is to keep the installer the same and change
> > the rpm's.  This won't solve everybody's problems,  but it will make
> > Fedora installs faster around my house.
> 
> Sometimes I find it better to choose reliably broken with known
> workarounds..than unreliably new. I'm more than willing to get on the
> bandwagon once someone shows me with that scripted respins of the
> distro like this don't need aggressive pre-release testing by putting
> these things out and the wild and collecting usage information and
> bugreports.  I'm not inclined to ask developers to take on
> unreasonable maintainership burden to keep respins sane and I'm not
> inclined to throwing respins over the wall and causing a bigger mess.
> 
> -jef"dragsters are fast.. lets all drive dragsters to work"spaleta
>




More information about the devel mailing list