Rawhide

[Dodji Seketeli]

Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> a écrit:

> Get a nice group of at least 10 or so folks who are active on this list
> to agree to run it full time on their main machine.   

Amen brother.  Count me in that group if this ever happens. 

I already run rawhide on a dedicated box for daily duties like email,
web browsing etc.  I have another box with a stable fedora release for
day to day hacking.  I switch between the two using a KVM swith (the
real hardware, you know, not the kernel virtualization thingy).

It seems to me that if more Fedora Hackers were running Rawhide all the
time, the delay we are seeing now in F18 could have been at least
predicted a long time ago.  The thing is, everybody is damn busy with
his own work/life schedule so we cannot force this on people.

Just having a dedicated Rawhide Swat Team of die hard volunteers who
could spot issues early, file more bugs, gently push for fixes in
Rawhide and last but not least build a kind of "esprit de corps" among
those who suffer Rawhide breakages for the greater good would be a great
start, IMHO.

Who knows, with time, these fine fellows could even inspire more Fedora
Hackers to actually test their builds on Rawhide.  We can dream.  :-)

> Additionally, if some number of these folks who pledge to run rawhide
> full time were provenpackagers we could just go in and fix things as
> they hit (or soon after) instead of waiting a while for fixes to go
> out. 

[+1] + vigorous nodding.

> I've run a rawhide vm/test machine here for many years. It's hit it's
> share of problems, but none were insurmountable. Some of them might
> have been for folks who were not more experienced tho, so increasing
> communication around rawhide can only help, IMHO. 

Could we have a rawhide-list for this?  I know fighting proliferation of
mailing list is a good thing, but practically speaking, being able to
quickly scan a mailing list before doing a yum update can help a
Rawhider evaluate in advance the odds of his risking to be unable to
reboot his machine or not.  :-)

> Additional thoughts to help rawhide: 
>
> - It's been suggested before, but could we practically keep N and N-1
>   packages in rawhide repos? Then 'yum downgrade' becomes much more
>   handy. Repodata size and mirror size might shoot that down though. 
>
> - Autoqa could perhaps help out, but I am not holding my breath. ;) 
>
> - Anaconda folks haven't wanted rawhide installer images as they cause
>   people to report bugs on things when not ready, etc. However, could
>   we build nightly cloud images at least? Those could help test things
>   and won't require hitting the installer path. 
>
> - I'm sure there's more ideas to improve it... 
>
  - I'd add, having a way for some provenpackagers of the Rawhide Swat
  Team to temporarily blacklist a (set of) package, if it appears to
  significantly break something; so that people doing yum update on
  Rawhide won't brick their system because of well know issue waiting to
  be solved.

-- 
		Dodji