"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 06:58:08PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 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.

This sounds pretty interesting to me.  I think I even understand it.

You're hopefully hitting two really important targets here -- making
the stuff for the N+1 release always more installable, minus some
delta for some broken deps, which of course we can continue to make
less frequent; and not slowing down the ability for developers to
submit and build brand new stuff.

Since this is essentially No Frozen Rawhide v2.0, are you planning to
update that wiki page with this new proposal?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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