Rawhide

[Dodji Seketeli]

"Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> a écrit:

> 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.

I know, I am one those.  And I feel alone.  Us poor Rawhide users could
"Unite", communicate, heck, commiserate!  At least on a psychological
standpoint, that'd be a progress, IMHO.

> Rawhide bugs are already reported.

I haven't said that no Rawhide bugs were reported.


You know what, I got some Rawhide bugs fixed by maintainers who don't
seem to be running Rawhide themselves.  And I find that a good step
already.  Just having a little bit more of that could be "nice".

I see this Fedora business as a best-effort, love-ridden task.  I don't
think the kind of problem we are talking about can be solved by a
magical formula; so I am inclined to accept any improvement, even tiny
little ones.  :-)

> The problem is not here,

I respectfully disagree.  A part of the problem could be addressed by
having a more organized and visible group of Rawhiders who can help each
other, grow the group by inspiring more Fedora Hackers to join, help
follow the status of particular bugs that are filled, etc ...

> 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).

I obviously agree with you that this is a problem.  Of course.  One
could say that the root cause of the problem is that these maintainers
don't have enough time to advance both their short term agendas (hack on
the features they are aiming for), and the medium to long term agenda of
the Greater Community.  We can argue about this endlessly.  And we can
also start getting those who are already Rawhiders to unite, try to help
themselves and promote their view as something good for the general
interest of our community at large.

> 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).

I don't know if *all* of systemd problems were reported, and am not
going to argue about it.  But I know that the systemd issues that
temporarily prevented me to boot Rawhide at some point got resolved
(indirectly at least) in Rawhide.

I think there is room to be optimistic without requiring every single
Fedora developer to run Rawhide.  If at some point we could have one
developer per group working on critical packages (e.g, one developer of
the kernel group, one of GNOME, one for base os stuff, one for the virt
subsystem, etc) to be in the Rawhide Swat Team, it would be just
*great*.  Of course, those of us who want to run Rawhide w/o hacking on
critical packages are welcome too, and they can be hugely helpful.

And I like to believe that we could achieve that by mean of love.  :)

Cheers.

-- 
		Dodji