"What is the Fedora Project?"

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Thu Oct 22 01:58:08 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 20:35 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > >I've heard a bit of preliminary rumbling about DSCM-like Rawhides -- a
> > >way for developers to have trees that move at their pace, and are
> > >possibly quite broken from time to time in ways that differ from each
> > >other.  If we were able to develop such a scenario, why not also
> > >provide the flipside of this idea -- make the One True Rawhide the
> > >place where we take in changes that don't break the world, while
> > >they're cobbled on in the other trees?  Whether this is an extension
> > >of the "KoPeR" idea or something entirely difficult, it merits serious
> > >consideration.
> > 
> > I very much like the aspect of the more stable rawhide here.
> 
> Jesse Keating brought up some concerns about integration, but aren't
> those concerns something that people would be interested in solving?
> (I'm assuming those people are the wide variety of engineers working
> in the Fedora community who are smarter than I.)
> 
> 

So my plans are really funny.  I plan to make rawhide more unstable more
of the time, and I plan to make "rawhide" more stable more of the time.
Crazy eh?  How can I do this?  By splitting "rawhide" in two.

Rawhide as we know it, /pub/fedora/linux/releases/development/ will
remain "rawhide".  We may even change the path to say rawhide, just to
catch things up and well I like keeping mirrors on their toes.  Rawhide
will be a repository of developmental and experimental packages.  Things
being worked on for the future.  It will /not/ be an installable tree,
rather it will just be a repository of packages, to be added on to an
already stable "base", eg you'd install F12, and enable rawhide to test
rawhide.  This will significantly lower the complaints that "rawhide
isn't installable".

The second face of rawhide, will be the "pending release", that is when
it comes time to feature freeze a release, we'll split it away from
rawhide.  We'll publish to /pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/13-pending/
or some such.  THIS tree will be installable.  It will be composed each
night, and we'll use bodhi to manage updates to this tree.  That means
this tree will have it's own "updates testing" where potential freeze
breaks can be tested and commented on by all, but won't risk the base
tree.  If testing pans out, it'll get tagged for the release, if not
it'll get thrown away.  This tree will spawn 13-Alpha, 13-Beta, the
snapshots in between, and eventually pub/fedora/linux/releases/13.

Remember that first rawhide?  Yeah, it kept going, unfrozen, leaping
toward Fedora 14.  You could still install 13-Alpha, or 13-pending, and
enable/update to rawhide to start testing Fedora 14 stuff.

What does this accomplish?  It provides a very easy release valve.
Instead of closing the valve and building up pressure while we freeze,
and tempting people to push things into our pending release that really
don't belong, we'll provide them a normal, never ending release of
pressure, called rawhide.  You can always find the latest stuff in
rawhide, there is nothing newer (unless we make KoPeRs happen).  We
don't have to worry about "rawhide" being installable.  We don't have to
worry about people dumping highly experimental or developmental stuff in
our pending release.  We don't have to worry about the giant pile of
builds for the next release building up while we polish the pending
release.  We don't have to worry about the giant pile of 0-day updates
building up while we polish the pending release, as we'll be pushing
these updates as we go.

This is my vision on how to accomplish both a always active development
stream, and a more stable pending release stream, keeping everybody
happy.  Want to help?  I'll be at FUDCon Toronto discussing roadblocks
to this vision and discussing why this vision sucks if anybody thinks
that it does.  Or just find me on IRC/email if you want to chat about
it.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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