Getting a working Rawhide installation

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 15:40 +1000, Amit Saha wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 15:17 +1000, Amit Saha wrote:
> >> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> > On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 14:34 +1000, Amit Saha wrote:
> >> >> Hi all,
> >> >>
> >> >> I want to setup a functional Rawhide installation for some testing.
> >> >> What is the recommended approach to get one? The nightly builds seem
> >> >> to be failing.
> >> >>
> >> >> I am fine with a fresh install or an upgrade, whichever works.
> >> >
> >> > The standard method is to install F17 and yum distro-sync to Rawhide.
> >> > You'll want to make sure you get selinux-policy 3.11.1, earlier builds
> >> > apparently break boot. I don't know if there are any other showstoppers
> >> > at present. Note, we branch for F18 and start building Alpha TCs quite
> >> > soon.
> >>
> >> Thanks. I will give it a shot.  And see what happens.
> >
> > For the record, instructions at
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide#Yum_update_from_previous_release (though actually that says it's not a good method...I disagree, and the text seems pretty old). I'd say it boils down to:
> >
> > yum install fedora-release-rawhide
> > (disable F17 repos in the graphical tool, enable Rawhide repo)
> > yum distro-sync
> >
> > and watch the pretty, pretty fireworks...
> 
> Tried this last night (on an un-updated F17 install)
> 
> # yum install fedora-release-rawhide
> # yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide update
> 
> It was quite unusable, always ran into rescue mode while boot. Could
> be the SElinux thing you mentioned earlier. 

That sounds pretty likely.

> I am trying again now.
> Here is what I plan to do:
> 
> # yum install fedora-release-rawhide
> # yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide distro-sync
> 
> Is that right?

More or less - I'd say 'yum --releasever=rawhide distro-sync', but
there's really not a huge degree of practical difference between the
three. The difference between 'update' and 'distro-sync' is that
'distro-sync' will *downgrade* a package if the version in the target
repo is lower than what you currently have installed - so if Rawhide is
behind F17, you'll get the Rawhide package, you won't keep the F17 one.
This is _usually_ what you'd want.

If your attempt yesterday failed then the slightly different command
won't likely fix it, but if it was the selinux issue you were hitting,
you might find you get the newer selinux-policy package today and things
work better. If not, grab it from Koji. It's easy enough to tell if
you're hitting the selinux issue: just boot with enforcing=0. If that
works, then you know what the problem was =)

For the record, I just substantially reworked/updated the instructions
on the Rawhide page, as they were somewhat antiquated and confused.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net