RFC: Fedora revamp proposal

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On Tue 05 Mar 2013 12:25:04 PM EST, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:10:58 -0500 Stephen Gallagher
> <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> Our original thoughts on this were that we would tie this to the 
>> bodhi/repocreate phase of things. Basically, before each
>> automatic repocreate run in Rawhide, we would run the set of tier
>> 1 and tier 2 acceptance tests. If any of them failed, we would
>> send out emails to the owners of any package that would have been
>> pushed to the repo and not push any of them.
> 
> I don't think koji has any sense of 'new packages' there. newRepo
> tasks just run over all the packages in a tag and make the repos.
> They don't know what package(s) change. :(
> 

Well, in that case I suppose we'd need to add a new tag-set, something
like rawhide-pending and run the tests over the combination rawhide
and rawhide-pending tags. If they started failing, don't move the
rawhide-pending tag to rawhide.

I'm not going to pretend at the moment that I know the perfect
technical solution to accomplish this at the moment.


>> Yes, it would be a manual step to update the tests to allow the
>> push to go through. I'm not going to deny the possibility that
>> some people might opt to bypass the process and just update the
>> tests as they go. We would prefer they did not (and if someone
>> gets caught doing this repeatedly, there are steps that can be
>> taken), but it helps us to avoid *unintentional* breakage, which
>> is the hallmark of Rawhide at this point.
> 
> Sure.
> 
>> It's worth noting that right now we are less than a week from
>> Alpha freeze for Fedora 19, and yet Rawhide is not installable.
>> This is what we would like to avoid.
> 
> Oh? How would we know? We don't make rawhide install images
> anymore...
> 
> Or this is some local testing you have done?
> 

This is local testing that has been done in concert with the feature
to add enterprise login support to Anaconda/firstboot. There's
currently no way to actually install from Rawhide cleanly in order to
do that testing.

>> When we drafted the proposal, our expectation was that AutoQA
>> would be a good fit here, mostly due to its current positioning
>> within the updates system. We reasoned that it would be a fit
>> place to make the gating decisions. If this proposal sees
>> sufficient support and approval, we will petition Red Hat for
>> dedicated resources on AutoQA (or whatever framework we settle
>> on). We believe that an installable Rawhide and more stable
>> development platform is in the best interests of Red Hat as well
>> (Note: I am not speaking in an official capacity as a Red Hat
>> employee here; this is my view as a member of both communities).
> 
> Well, bodhi is not used for rawhide in any way currently... so,
> not sure how we can properly fit autoqa in there. :(
> 

Hmm, I suppose I thought Bodhi was involved quietly. If it's not, then
you may be right and we should look into other integration points.

I suppose the biggest question that needs answering in this thread is
this: Is this a goal that the Fedora community as a whole sees as
worth investing time and effort into? Obviously, my view is "yes". I
think that if we can make Rawhide more consumable, we'll have a place
where we can reasonably expect people to do development (as opposed to
the current model where people are mainly using Rawhide as a place to
either throw untested upstream packages or else do last-minute
integration right before a freeze).
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