Is Rawhide supposed to be useful?

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Tue, 10 May 2011 12:04:22 -0400
Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:

> > 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.  
> 
> In the week before F15 change freeze, are you really surprised that 
> nobody's running the F16 dumping ground?

I'm not talking about this week.  The X11 problem was reported three weeks
ago, and the "don't run Rawhide" advice given to me came rather before
that.  Rawhide has been an unusually painful place to be for some time
now, and a lot of people, I believe, have opted out of it.

I'm getting close to doing the same, despite having run Rawhide on my
desktop for a *long* time.

Your response really just reinforces my concern.  What value does the
distribution get from a "dumping ground"?

Thanks,

jon