'Joining in' wiki page draft

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 15:57 -0500, Leam Hall wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote a good bit that all got snipped.  :)
> 
> My writing style leans towards encouraging, and there's an occasionaly 
> bit of exhortation. QA is not a clique, I'd rather have it reverted than 
> misunderstood. What I was after was the average person's desire to join 
> a functioning group. Sort of "we're a team and you're welcome!".

Well, I can see what you mean for sure. I don't know, it's a balancing
act I guess.

> Same for the RCHT/RHCE phrase. A certification is less relevant than 
> skills. From what I see you need RHCT level skills to be able to get 
> Rawhide running. Even the pre-releases can be bumpy but aren't quite so 
> demanding. If you don't set a reasonable expectation at the beginning 
> then do you risk a sense of dysfunction if the volunteer thought Rawhide 
> was easy as a production version? On the flip side, if someone doesn't 
> have RCHT/RHCE certs and they are able to work with Rawhide you're 
> giving then a serious pat on the back.

Let me put it less high-mindedly, then. I am aiming to do a bit of
constructive lying. ;)

I don't think you really need RHCT / RHCE skills to get Rawhide running,
but yeah, it's probably a bit of a slog. However, it shouldn't be.
There's no fundamental reason a development distribution shouldn't be
accessible to anyone who has reasonable familiarity with Linux and the
distro in question, a *spare* system of some kind, and the flexibility
to accept that some stuff will break sometimes. If it takes more than
that to use Rawhide, honestly I think that's a problem and one that
directly has a negative impact on Fedora quality, because reasonably
widespread ongoing testing of the development distro *ought* to be a big
part of QA. One way to break this cycle is just to throw a few more
sacrificial victims at Rawhide. As long as they try it on a test system
the worst that can happen is it fails, and they give up. That's not a
disaster. If they ignore the message, install on a critical system and
it blows up, that's not our fault, because we did *tell* 'em. Over time,
if a few more people start running Rawhide, it'll start to get less
hairy, I think, and we'll get an improvement in overall quality. It's a
long-term vision, but you've got to start *somewhere*.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net