Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 09:58 -0700, Eric Smith wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2014 2:33 PM, "Kevin Fenzi" <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 23 Jan 2014 19:03:02 +0100
> > Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> > > I'm still undecided if I overall like Fedora.next or fear it. But
> more
> > > and more I tend to the latter position and wonder if it might be
> wise
> > > to slow things down: Do one more Fedora release the old style in
> round
> > > about June; that would give us more time to better discuss and
> work
> > > out Fedora.next and get contributors involved better in the
> planing.
> >
> > This is not practical. Lots of people are thinking about a
> > fedora.next, qa folks are coding away, lots of people who normally
> > would be working on the next release are not. If we tell them to
> stop
> > all that and go back to normal, we could, but then fedora.next will
> > likely never ever happen.
> [...]
> > The current problem I have with Fedora.next is that it's so
> abstract.
> 
> How are QA folks "coding away" for Fedora.next, rather than
> traditional Fedora QA processes, if Fedora.next is "so abstract"?

We're not really coding *for* Fedora.next, we're coding the new autoqa
system (taskotron) which we need whether Fedora.next happens or not (I'm
not suggesting seriously that it won't, I'm just making the point that
taskotron is not at all dependent on .next). Where .next comes into it
is that the longer cycle for F21 is kind of tied into the .next stuff,
and in turn, the longer cycle is what's affording QA's tools folks the
space and time to get taskotron into working order - our assessment was
that we could get taskotron ready for F21 on the delayed schedule, but
not on the 'regular' schedule.

I believe some of the ideas encompassed by .next more or less assume the
existence of a mature automated testing framework and certain tests
within that framework, so .next may consider itself dependent on
taskotron, but the dependency doesn't run the other way: we were working
on taskotron before .next became a Thing at all, and we'd still be
working on it if .next wasn't a Thing.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net