Fwd: What do rawhide testers want and expect?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

Not sure if this went through either so forwarding as requested.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jonathan Corbet <corbet at lwn.net>
Date: Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 15:50
Subject: Re: What do rawhide testers want and expect?
To: Development discussions related to Fedora <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
Cc: smooge at gmail.com


[ I'm not directly subscribed to devel, so this may not go through; if so,
Stephen, can you forward it on if it seems worthwhile? ]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:57:34 -0600
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

FWIW, I've been running Rawhide for many years.  I've found it to be a good
early warning system for what's coming, a good way to easily mess with
current software, and, often, just fun.  It's also a decent platform for
kernel development and a way to, hopefully, help push things forward by
finding and reporting bugs in the distribution.

I fully expect it to break occasionally; I'm prepared for that and know
how to recover.

In the last year or two I'm finding that Rawhide is not as useful to me
and not as much fun.  Things break more often, and they tend to stay
broken for a long time.  I don't remember when gnucash last worked, for
example; the bug I filed has not gotten a great deal of attention.  The
fact that X was broken for a long time and nobody seemed to care spoke
volumes to me.

I've been told several times now that Fedora developers don't bother with
the "Rawhide dumping ground" and that I should be running the next-release
branched version.  Sometimes it seems like I'm about the only person
left.  That may be exaggerated, but it is clear that "no frozen Rawhide"
has translated to "wilder and slower-to-fix Rawhide with fewer users."

As a result, I have, for a little while now, been thinking about moving on
to something else.  I don't know what the value of $SOMETHING_ELSE is
yet, but it may well not be Fn+1.  I need a sustained period where I'm not
in an airplane - or preparing to get into an airplane - to figure that out.

Naturally, Rawhide doesn't exist to make my life easier or more
interesting.  When I raised a similar issue some months ago, the responses
suggested that, for Fedora developers, it's doing what it's supposed to do
and that they were happy.  So perhaps there's nothing really wrong with
Rawhide, even if it no longer quite fills the niche that it once did.

Thanks,

jon



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren