Is It Worth Installing F9 Alpha?
Michael Schwendt
mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam at arcor.de
Mon Mar 10 11:42:26 UTC 2008
On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:08:32 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
> > Conclusively, after a few days already, the tester no longer tests F9 Alpha,
> > but a rapidly changing collection of packages. Let's hope this will change
> > with the Beta release and the feature freeze.
>
> I was never really suggesting that 'Alpha' as a snapshot still needed testing.
?
> It is a well accepted fact that 'Alpha' is meant as a test of installability
> more than anything else and nearly all the packages are obsolete for testing
> purposes a week or two later.
qed. Together with the cases where the post-Alpha packages get worse,
that is a good example of why testing the Alpha doesn't make much sense.
Even if a pkg in the Alpha worked fine, the next one may be one of the
many infamous version upgrades that spreads wreckage all over the floor.
The terminology (test1 -> test2, or alpha -> beta) doesn't matter much,
if there is no road from the former release to the latter.
The recent F8 kernel update is in the same area. In bodhi it's at karma -6
already, not counting anonymous users. The first tester there gave it +1
although he had to delete/reconfig his network profiles (which probably
was the same bug that hit me and killed the network).
> F9 Development does however, need the testing,
Then make it more tester-friendly.
> Just because there is a new build of a package doesn't mean a report against a
> prior build is a waste of time either, it just means you have something to check
> in the future (whether it is fixed).
Exactly that *is* a waste of resources.
> You report it, you check later after you
> update, if its still there then the developer knows about it early, if its not
> still there you close your own bug.
... and open a new one, because the version upgrade (re-)introduces bugs.
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