What do rawhide testers want and expect?

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Mon Sep 12 16:17:18 UTC 2011


On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 09:57:34 -0600,
  Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> In reading the long trash each other fest that accompanies pre-release
> jitters, could we start on a cleaner plate? What do the people who are
> using rawhide day-in/day-out expect out of the channel? What level of
> pain does someone like Jonathan Corbet expect and how can we better
> serve them? [And no this isnt me trying for another distro quote of
> the week, he is just my reference point of someone I know who runs
> rawhide day in and out.]

I am currently using rawhide for my main home desktop. My use of it changes
over time. Sometimes it's because I want to start testing what will be
branched before branching has occurred. Sometimes I want to test bigger
changes there to evaluate whether a major update is baked enough for the
next release or to see if it is suitable for previous releases.

Things that cause problems for me are broken dependencies and people not
doing rawhide builds, causing fixes to be delayed. (Note that rawhide doesn't
inherit stuff in updates-testing.)

I seem to run into kernel issues more than other people. Though I am now
finding that working with upstream directly for regessions in development
kernels seems to be a better process than going through Fedora.

Changes in gnome have had significant negative impact for periods during
this development cycle. But that isn't much different than for branched
and probably will be less likely to be an issue again for several releases.


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