Managing Fedora Testing

William Hooper whooperhsd3 at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 31 02:39:18 UTC 2004


Keith Lofstrom said:
>
> Keith Lofstrom said:
>> ...
>> Instead, I would divide up the work into domains so that people can
>> choose a domain and test in that.  Where to draw the line is difficult,
>> but I would probably make the domains "kernel and drivers",
>> "installation
>> and update", "X and desktops", and "applications".  Obviously, many
>> problems will cross domains, but to the extent that you can partition
>> things you reduce the scope of most problems.
>
> William Hooper replies:
>> What is preventing you from updating the "domain" you choose from
>> Rawhide
>> and testing?
>
> Nothing prevents me from doing that, but it does not resemble my
> goal, which is to work with a group of like-minded individuals to
> locate functional and conceptual errors in a "distro" - that is, a
> collection of software packages that play well together.  If all
> packages in a distro were autonomous and well behaved, then it
> would be easy to do as you say - in fact, there would not need to
> be a Fedora test team, just individual test teams associated with
> each package, checking conformance to specification.  If there were
> just 20 packages in a distro, a domain system would not be useful,
> twenty items is easy to keep track of.
>
> But as it is, there are thousands of packages in the Fedora distro,
> with strong coupling between many.  Without further partitioning,
> that is a recipe for engineering disaster.  No mind is big enough
> to encompass all the interactions.  So you break the problem down.

What is stopping you from just updating the 20 or so packages you want to
test?  I still don't see the benefit of trying to track 5 different trees
and somehow magically merge them.  It just causes confusion because person
A sees a bug, but it has been fixed in another tree.  How do you handle
that?

Test what you feel qualified to test.  Update what you want to update from
Rawhide (like when you find a bug and want to see if the newer version
fixes it).  Report bugs.  I don't see what the issue is.  The current
development model has worked up through RH 9...


-- 
William Hooper





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