Beware of rebooting in rawhide right now

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-07-12 at 09:53 +0200, Zdenek Kabelac wrote:
> Dne 11.7.2012 22:18, Adam Williamson napsal(a):
> > On Sun, 2012-07-08 at 13:37 -0700, Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R wrote:
> >
> >> Before the next netinst is released perhaps the developers could be
> >> bothered to make sure it actually works.
> >
> > That's not how Rawhide works. The images in the Rawhide tree are
> > automatically generated. There's no testing or release process. They
> > just get built periodically. If they work, great. If they don't, no-one
> > guaranteed that they would.
> >
> 
> 
> Which is pretty bad plan...
> 
> You want to have Rawhide being used by skilled people - to catch bugs early,
> not just a week before new Fedora release.
> 
> But if the quality of Rawhide will go to the road of trashing people's hard 
> drives - skilled developers will leave Rawhide and will go for another distro.
> 
> I just hope there is minority of Fedora people who believe this is the right 
> thing to do....
> 
> IMHO every package maintainer should seriously care about its package and 
> always test it himself FIRST and avoid releasing packages with obvious killer 
> bugs.

You don't really need to be releasing packages with 'obvious killer
bugs' to have issues generating network install images that work. The
whole stack - _any_ whole stack of an OS all the way up to an
interactive installer - is monstrously complicated and the only way to
be really sure that complete generated installer images are viable and
working is, well, to generate them and test each one, automatically or
manually. It's really not plausible to expect every packager to test
every possible use case of their package before updating it in Rawhide.
Rawhide is a dev branch. There's a limit to how many testing
requirements you can impose on a dev branch before it stops serving its
purpose.

Note that nothing discussed in this thread has anything to do with
'trashing people's hard drives'. One bug has been discussed which breaks
boot with encrypted partitions; then Chuck asserted that the
auto-generated Rawhide netinst image currently isn't working. There was
no report of any kind of data loss. Data loss bugs usually are treated
with high urgency even in Rawhide.

I don't think it's realistically possible to expect the dev branch of an
entire Linux distribution which is fast-moving, maintained by a fairly
small group of developers, and has fairly limited QA resources to be
reliably functional all the time. We can aim to _improve_ things, of
course, we always can, but we have to set realistic goals...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net