What do rawhide testers want and expect?

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 09:57 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> What do the people who are using rawhide day-in/day-out expect out of
> the channel?

My expectation is something that basically works. Like others have said,
I expect occasional breakage, but my "rawhide criterion" is "latest
version that works", not "latest version, let's see if it works". 

Ideally, when stuff breaks, there should be some centralised way of
co-ordinating fixes/workarounds like "common bugs" in the release docs.
All that's probably needed is a wiki page - I know test@ exists, but I
don't particularly want to a. follow another list, b. rely on mail
working :D to fix a broken rawhide.

I think this description from the wikipage is pretty much the ideal
statement of the tension in rawhide:

        "End users should not use Rawhide as their main day-to-day
        workstation. Because Rawhide is a development branch, many
        changes are not heavily tested (or tested at all) before being
        released to Rawhide, and packages in Rawhide can and do break
        without warning. It is even possible that bugs in Rawhide could
        cause data loss. However, testing Rawhide is a very valuable
        activity which helps direct Fedora development and ensure that
        the quality of the stable releases is high."

I think the more people on rawhide, testing, the better. So that implies
to me that the barrier to using rawhide be as low as possible, which
means avoiding breaking changes - in particular, "many changes ... not
tested at all" just isn't appropriate IMHO.

Cheers

Alex.


--
This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean.
http://www.betterhosted.com