FC4 state of affairs and FC5

[Paul A Houle]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:

>
>that's the deal breaker..... who exactly is going to test these
>respins on that weekly or monthly basis to make sure they work?  I
>argue that even during the long test period there aren't enough people
>doing installer tests..even with the few test release isos. How many
>people are really going to test the weekly or monthly update respins?
>  
>
    I don't really know how bad the problems are.  Most of the codepath 
involved in the install is going to be on the CD and not on the rpms.  
Most of the rpms are getting 'tested' by people who are running 
up2date.  The main questions I see are

(i) will something about the rpms cause the installer to malfunction?
(ii) will something go wrong during firstboot...  this is the one code 
path that isn't getting tested daily by Fedora users.

    Careful software engineering can minimize the codepath affected by 
(i) and (ii) problems and reduce the chance of problems.

>And if respins have different bugs than the release isos..who is
>accountable for those bugreports? If these isos are going to be
>created by the fedora project itself..there will be an expectation
>that problems will be address by the fedora developers.  I doubt the
>anaconda developers and release team are prepared to take on the
>burden of such lightly tested and frequently occuring respins.
>
>  
>
    Well,  you've already got configuration management problems from 
up2date.  If I complain that something "doesn't work" post-install,  
that bug report needs to be qualified by the versions of all rpm's that 
might have something to do with the problem -- in principle,  this can 
be awful -- just about everything depends on glibc and the kernel...  
problems there can result in mysterious symptoms everywhere.

>Sure people can create these on their own and offer them up without
>the official "blessing" of the Fedora project.. but they aren't
>necessarily easy to find.  How do you make community driven solutions
>to common annoyances to Core widely available without officially
>"blessing" in such a way to make sure users are not confused about
>exactly whom to report problems to.  As bad as the release iso can be
>for some hardware...unmaintained and untested respins have the
>potential to be far worse.
>  
>
    Well,  it depends what your goals are.

    It's dangerous to make changes to the installer -- this will be good 
for people who are having problems installing.

    A less ambitious goal is to keep the installer the same and change 
the rpm's.  This won't solve everybody's problems,  but it will make 
Fedora installs faster around my house.