Rawhide

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 5 novembre 2012 10:45, Dodji Seketeli a écrit :

> 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.

There is already a pool of rawhide users.
Rawhide bugs are already reported.

The problem is not here, the problem is maintainers that deliberately
ignore bugs with rawhide in them (usual excuse and motto are "Rawhide eats
babies", "I'll test when Rawhide is more stable", no empathy for other
maintainers that can not test because your problem is breaking their test
process). They hope the problems will go away before branch time, and then
cry they get too little time to fix stuff after branching when the very
same problems hit alpha testers, or badger the reporters to file a new
report at branch time without even checking the information that was
provided before and assuming it is necessarily stale.

All the systemd problems were reported in Rawhide way before they hit
branched. If they did hit branched it's not because reporting was lacking,
but because there was a lack of social pressure not to let Rawhide rot
(with easily predictable consequences).

When systemd inclusion was deferred in stable because it was not ready and
no service had been migrated there was *no* effort I could see to fix the
problem in Rawhide and systemd hit the next branch time with all the
problems that justified initial deferring intact.

Someone wrote in this thread that Gnome updates were painful in branched.
Well they are horrific in Rawhide. If there was some effort to make them
only painful in Rawhide they would not be horrific in branched. (this is
called a 'virtuous circle').

IMHO it was a huge mistake to synchronise Fedora releases with GNOME
releases instead of synchronising Fedora branch times with GNOME release
times. That's idiotic and means there is no time Fedora-side to do any QA
and fixing before pushing a new GNOME release to users.

(two high-visibility examples anyone can understand, not necessarily the
worst offenders and systemd people at least seem to have improved their
workflow a little over time)

Adding time to the end of the circle is compounding the problem, not
fixing it.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot