Is Rawhide supposed to be useful?

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Tue, 10 May 2011 11:18:54 +1000
Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> This is my fault, sorry. I updated the server but missed out on rebuilding
> the drivers. And with one thing leading to another, Easter came, I forgot
> about it and the above bug didn't show up on my radar until ajax pinged me
> this morning.

So I must confess that this makes me curious.  

Things breaking in Rawhide are not a surprise; indeed, if it doesn't
occasionally bite the hand that's feeding it, somebody probably isn't
trying hard enough.  But if it can remain this fundamentally broken for
weeks because the relevant developer forgot to fix it, it's hard not to
conclude that nobody is really running it.

Rawhide used to be something we could run to see where the distribution is
going and, perhaps, help a little bit with the quality assurance.  More
recently, I've been told a few times that I should *not* be running
Rawhide and that the F15 branch is where the updates and fixes go.  It
leaves me wondering what Rawhide is for anymore; what value does it bring
to Fedora if nobody tries to actually run it for real work?

Could it be that Fedora lacks the resources to maintain both Rawhide and
the next-release branch?  In retrospect, was No Frozen Rawhide as good an
idea as it seemed?

Thanks,

jon