Testing Fedora - small (?) suggestion.

[Gilboa Davara]

Hello all,

I use Fedora daily, and I have a vested interest in -actively- helping
Fedora (and in-turn RHEL) become a better product.
I don't have a dedicated Rawhide machine, I do play with it from time to
time using VMWare Server, but this is fairly light testing as I'm pretty
short on time. (Just to see what's new)
I -do- try to install (at least on a VM machine) every test release and
give it a day or two of testing - but even this is hardly enough.

FC6 was a good release, but certain managed to slip through... some of
them rather critical (i586 kernel springs to mind) which should have
been found by us. (Read: testers)

As I see it, there's not enough Rawhide users to reduce the release bug
count, mainly because:
A. In my experience, 1 out of 2 rawhide installs break due to missing
dependencies - and spending four hours (and ~1+GB of bandwidth) just to
watch Anaconda choke on missing pygtk package is very frustrating.
B. Rawhide tends to break, a-lot.
C. As much as I disagree with this notion, people view Fedora as RHEL's
Alpha and view Rawhide as "experimental Alpha".

More then anything FC6 proved that 3 test releases may not be enough to
get a bug free release, so let me suggest the following:
A. Create more mile-stone releases. Once the tree reaches build
integrity (no missing packages), spin a test release. (Fixes P1, P2)
B. Change the terms that are being used to describe each test release.
Whether we like it or not, people are used to the "Alpha", "Beta" and
"RC" terms, and tend to consider "Test release" as "Alpha release". I
understand that the term "Test" was used to differentiate the
ever-rolling Fedora from the release-based RHEL, but Fedora has aged
enough to be viewed as an entity by itself and we can drop the "Test"
term.
Using "normal" terms should help combat the "RHEL Alpha" and 'RHEL Alpha
experimental" image problem (Fixes P3). 
C. Once Fedora hits RC, only bug fixes go into the tree. No last minute
2.6.39 kernel that break Anaconda, SCSI, and USB two days before the
release. Nada. New features can always enter the tree as updates once
the release ISOs have been sent.

Here's a mock Fedora release schedule:
T-4 Months: Alpha1
T-X Months: AlphaX
T-1 Months: Beta
T-3 weeks: RC1 - Tree go into lock mode.
T-1.5 weeks: RC2
T+n weeks: unexpected RC3.
T: release. Part time.

- Gilboa