Fedora and Rawhide

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Oscar A. Valdez wrote:

>In the future, will Rawhide be "compatible" with current Fedora
>releases?

Simple answer:  No.

Longer answer:  Rawhide is a public snapshot of the constantly 
moving and changing internal software builds at Red Hat of what 
will eventually become the next OS release.  It has always been 
this, and current plans are to continue this.  At some point in 
time changes will start getting into the tree which are no doubt 
incompatible with Fedora Core 1.  That will be very intentional.  
Not intentional in the sense of "break compatibility" but 
intentional as in "proceed with development".  Some of these 
incompatibilities of course will be temporary and randomly coming 
and going, whereas others will be permanent due to new technology 
inclusion, packaging incompatibilities and many other factors.

Of course, wherever possible, we try to avoid unnecessary 
incompatibilites, but that isn't always possible either.

Basically, don't treat or use rawhide as your official "updates
for Fedora Core 1" location or you very much will get horribly
burned in a couple of weeks, perhaps a month or not long after
that, when major changes go into the tree.  Treat Rawhide with
caution, because rawhide has absolutely zero QA testing done on
it, and is essentially "this package built, cool".  In many cases
that package will work fine.  In other cases it wont work at all.  
In other cases it will stop other packages from working too.  In
worse cases, it will break your system, requiring some nasty
trickery to get things back in order.  In even worse cases it
will trash your system completely and possibly destroy some or
all of your data.  There are never any guarantees using rawhide,
and probably never will be because we need a place to "just build
stuff" and to "find out what breaks" and that is what becomes
rawhide.

It's even possible that rawhide could physically damage your 
hardware, because the software is totally untested, and there are 
various bad things that can occur in untested video drivers, 
kernel drivers, etc.

Does this mean people trash their systems every 5 minutes when 
using Rawhide?  No, but it does mean that that is very possible, 
and to be aware of it and not ever use rawhide on production 
systems.

Just remember...  caveat emptor.  ;o)

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat