Stable Release Updates types proposal

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Thu Mar 18 21:00:31 UTC 2010


On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 20:47 +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:

> Although I understand Fedora's frontier status, I think the graphics
> system changes could probably have been handled better. After the kernel and
> core shared libraries the graphics system is probably the next essential
> core OS subsystem (At least for desktop systems). It seems most of peoples
> stability issues with fedora stem from graphics. I do understand the
> difficulty with the multitude of different graphics chipsets out there. But
> this is where Fedora could shine with its close links to upstream development. 
> It would have been good to be very upfront with this and get a group to
> define and setup some basic graphics tests and loudly promote users to
> perform tests with these both pre-release and post-release.

We've done this, since F11, with the Graphics Test Days. They get a very
large response. That's mostly how we know what's broken.

>  This with a
> website with test status versus graphics board/chipsets and with good
> easy linkages to Bugzilla (more user friendly)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-09_Radeon#Results
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-10_Nouveau#Results
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-11_Intel#Results

>  and perhaps a separate
> graphics-testing repository to keep quick graphics updates away from
> the "stable" release etc. 

This would likely do more harm than good by increasing developer
overhead and making everyone very confused about exactly what anyone was
running...

> If enough upstream developers, Fedora packagers
> and testing users were in on this I think great inroads into getting stable
> and good graphics systems would be made in a relatively short time.

That's somewhat optimistic; no matter how much testing we do, we can
only afford a certain amount of full-time developer muscle. The testing
has helped to improve efficiency and direction of graphics development
work, I think, but there's fundamentally a lot of work to do and only a
limited amount of manpower to do it with.

The X devs are always very happy to take new volunteers. :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net



More information about the devel mailing list