RawhideBlocker [was Re: QA group activities + goals discussion]

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 18:18:13 +0000,
  Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 14:38 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > 1. Increase participation in Rawhide: it provides a huge benefit in
> > terms of identifying issues and having them fixed quickly and early in
> > the cycle.
> 
> Agreed - rawhide has a bad rep, and lots of people tend to avoid it. It
> has been improving lately, but we should keep trying out new things to
> get it to the stage that anyone involved in Fedora development should be
> able to run rawhide.

You really need to know what you are doing if you want to track rawhide.
For example just an hour ago I rebooted after updating to today's rawhide
and the boot failed. Because I had been reading about issues with mdadm
and rules files and the problem was with raid arrays I was able to guess
that moving one of the mdadm rules files out of the way might fix things
and lo and behold that worked. This is not something I would expect a
normal user to be able to easily do.
This kind of thing usually happens to me a couple of times between alpha
and the release.

And this doesn't include the KMS issues this (and the previous) cycle. They
are easier to deal with, but you still need to know about it. Perhaps this
isn't typical of most rawhide cycles, but similar things will no doubt
happen in future rawhide cycles.