Release criterion proposal: upgrade methods

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 13:33 -0400, Richard Ryniker wrote:
> >The installer must be able to successfully complete an upgrade
> >installation from a clean, fully updated default installation (from any
> >official install medium) of the previous stable Fedora release via any
> >officially supported upgrade mechanism. The upgraded system must meet
> >all release criteria.
> 
> Sounds like a political statement - good words with almost no content.
> It would be nearly as useful, and easier to say "Everything that has to
> work will work."
> 
> If there is no reasonable way to explicitly say in this criterion what
> should work, at least add references to specific documents that define
> "official install media" and "officially supported upgrade mechanism."
> 
> I think it better to accept that criteria may have to be revised for a
> new release than to craft criteria so general they never need to change,
> or so empty of detail they have little direct value and require research
> to understand what they actually mean.

Is the concept of 'official install media' and a 'supported/recommended
upgrade mechanism' really so vague as to be meaningless? I don't think
I'd agree with that. It seems fairly clear to me. I do think in
principle we should have documents that define what currently fulfils
generic definitions like that, but the problem is that when you think
about it, those documents very rarely ought to be ones QA 'owns', so
it's not always straightforward to ensure it happens. For this specific
case though, I think we could link to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading to define
'supported/recommendation upgrade mechanism' - that's clearly the
'official' page for such things and should be updated whenever it
changes. 'official install media' is not quite as obvious; maybe it
should be a link to the Deliverables SOP when I or someone else finally
gets that done (my last draft is still at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Adamwill/Draft_releng_SOP_deliverables ).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net