Fedora 13 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting: 2010-03-04 @ 01:00 UTC Recap

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 14:17 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> James Laska wrote:
> > Representatives from Fedora QA, Rel-Eng and Development met on IRC to
> > review determine whether the Fedora 13 Alpha release criteria [1] have
> > been met.  The team agreed that the Alpha criteria have been met, and to
> > proceed with releasing F-13-Alpha-RC4.
> 
> Oh, because a KDE live image which can't be updated without resorting to the 
> command line is <SARCASM>obviously</SARCASM> ready for release, and because 
> there was <SARCASM>clearly</SARCASM> no way a RC5 could have been spun in 
> the several days between the availability of the updated kpackagekit build 
> (to match the PackageKit snapshot used in RC4) and this meeting.

I did explicitly explain to you and the other desktop SIGs at the start
of the F13 cycle that, because we just hadn't had time to discuss all
the thorny implications of the question, the desktop criteria would be
considered only with regards to the default desktop. Which is GNOME.

The desktop criteria and validation tests did not exist before F13. It's
extremely unlikely we would ever have blocked any previous Alpha release
because graphical updating failed in *any* desktop. This reflects a
tightening of our release quality standards, not a loosening. In future
I'd like to have all the major desktops (KDE, XFCE, LXDE) considered as
well as just GNOME, but doing so in F13 would have been premature.

I would have liked to do a respin of the KDE live image with the new
kpackagekit, and we did have a brief discussion with releng about that
at the initial go/no-go meeting, but we kind of dropped the ball in the
next few days on that, for which I'm sorry. It wasn't intentional.

> On one hand we have people complaining about the quality of updates, on the 
> other hand we're happily releasing crap we know is broken.

It's an *alpha*. 'Crap we know is broken' is more or less the definition
of alphas. =)

> But of course the GNOME spin "works" (for some definition of "works", they 
> also have a PackageKit issue which was declared not a blocker – 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=567346 , which I guess also 
> affects KPackageKit, by the way –, 

Yeah, it probably does. It's been declared not-blocker because it's
ultimately caused by the langpacks plugin, so there's an acceptable
workaround - uninstall that - which is documented on the CommonBugs
page. Also, it will only happen in a case where there's dependency
problems, so when the available F13 update set is actually *coherent*,
it won't fail.

> and they fail pretty much all the tests 
> for beta or release quality, which I think the KDE spin would actually pass, 

Yup. We don't block Alpha release if it fails the criteria for Beta or
Final. That's the pre-release process working. =) If you look at the
linked bug reports, most of the failures are fairly minor. For instance,
one test 'fails' because if you open System Tools - CD/DVD Creator, drag
in some files and hit 'burn', it crashes nautilus instead of running
Brasero. You can easily run Brasero directly and burn a disc, though.
I'd hope you'd agree that's a perfectly acceptable level of
functionality for an *Alpha* release.

> given that this is the same 4.4.0 we pushed as F11 and F12 updates and works 
> fine there, though I didn't bother testing this as clearly nobody cares 
> about the KDE spin test results anyway), so nobody cares.

I'd hope it would be obvious I *do* care, since I took the trouble to go
around to you and the LXDE and XFCE SIGs and ask if you'd have time to
kindly help fill in the results tables. By the same token, as explained
above, I *did* explain that we're unfortunately not considering the
results as binding on the release schedule for F13. However, having the
results is very useful for us all to know where the release stands, for
us to document significant issues in CommonBugs (I'll document the KDE
update issue there), and to establish the process for future releases
where hopefully it can become binding. Also, if any of the non-default
desktops had been known to be really horribly broken - as in, 'the damn
thing won't start up', or something - we would have considered making
that an Alpha blocker.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net