Rawhide dailies on USB drive

Christopher Beland beland at alum.mit.edu
Wed Feb 18 14:37:43 UTC 2009


Partly in reply to Adam's message on "QA group activities + goals
discussion"...

One thing that might help get more people running Rawhide is the
ability to do so from removable media.

For example, just now I wanted to test some hardware-specific bugs on
my laptop, but this is the computer I use every day, so I don't want
to risk installing Rawhide on it.  I just went onto the wiki to find
out how to create a Rawhide LiveUSB, and it looks like that's not
possible for the daily updates.  So I'll use the alpha release, but
this is a few weeks out of date and if developers release fixes into
daily Rawhide, I won't be able to test them until the beta release.

I bet there are a lot of people who unlike me don't have a spare
computer they can use just for testing.  Some of them could probably
be convinced to boot into Rawhide for a little while to play around
with it.  There seemed to be a big boost of testers after the alpha
release, probably due to three factors - it's presumed (rightly or
wrongly) to be installable and not completely broken or in some way
"ready" for testing, it gets more publicity than the daily releases,
and it has live media available.

I don't know why live media aren't automatically produced on a daily
or weekly basis; perhaps it is not technically feasible.  An
interesting alternative would actually be the ability to put a normal
install on a USB stick, that could be updated with yum.  If that's
possible now, it's not explained how to do so on the
[[Releases/Rawhide]] wiki page.

-B.




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