Testing test releases: do not update

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, shmuel siegel wrote:

> I think that Robert Day's initial point is correct. If there is no
> stable baseline then testers are constantly finding superficial bugs;
> deep bugs that take hours of testing will never get reached. Alan Cox is
> also right when he states that a tester should check against the current
> state of rawhide before he reports a bug.

the more i read posted on this, the more i'm coming to sort of understand
the other positions so, yes, i'm starting to understand the philosophy of,
this early in the release process, just drive all of the changes out there
and see what breaks.

but i guess it means that, unlike previous test releases from red hat,
these early test releases really are unusable as *anything* but test
platforms.  as i mentioned in a previous post, it used to be that
ambitious testers would just flat out install the test release, knowing
that it would have problems, but they'd be prepared to deal with that,
*knowing* that as bugs were reported and patches issued, their systems
would slowly get more and more stable, and their lives would return to
normal.  well, as normal as testers' lives get.

but with this new fedora approach, that's just not true anymore, at least
for the first release or two.  if one is constantly updating against
rawhide, then you have to assume that, as some things get fixed, others
will get broken.  which makes it pretty much impossible to use such a
system for useful work, no?  not a complaint, just an observation.  :-)

based on what i read, it's only toward the very end of the entire testing 
cycle (FC2-test3) that feature freezes start to kick in and we should see
things returning to normal in preparation for the official release.

does this sound about right?

rday

p.s.  i'm still interested in a real tester's document some day.

p.p.s.  and i'm still curious about what constitutes the "Fedora Core 
devel" version that's listed at bugzilla.  if i'm running FC2-test1, and 
i'm regularly updating against rawhide, and i run into a bug, do i file it 
against "test1" or "devel"?  what if i have no idea whether it was an 
original test1 package, or it was an upgrade from rawhide?  or does 
"devel" mean something totally different?

p.p.p.s.  can we just officially call it "rawhide" again?  :-P