unfrozen repo somewhere?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 22:38 -0400, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 14:31 -0400, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> > > Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 2008-09-26 at 11:11 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > > > > Hello,
> 
> > > > > I understand why rawhide should be frozen at some points,
> 
> > > > Openly said, I don't understand this. To me, these freezes are a defect
> > > > in Rel-Eng's procedures, which could easily be overcome, if they wanted
> > > > to.
> 
> > > What Rel-Eng wants is that the rawhide snapshot that Is To Be Fedora-<next>
> > > gets beaten to a pulp by us rawhideans. Yes, I'd also like for the
> > > rollercoaster ride to continue, but there is no way around that us crazy
> > > bunch needs a little gentle leading to help out stabilize the next
> > > release. Plus I can imagine that most (all?) developers are concentrating
> > > on that job, so there are not many hands free to work of pushing the
> > > envelope forward in any case.
> 
> > What I would like to see it Rel-Eng to adopt the development principles,
> > most other developments apply:
> > 
> > Decouple "product development" (here: FC<N+1>) development from bleeding
> > edge "unstable/experimental" "head development" (here: rawhide).
> 
> Needs more hands. Starves the "product development" of developers and
> testers.
I don't see this - To the contrary. I feel the current model is driving
away developers and testers, esp. packagers.

>  Was the idea in Linux before 2.6, was abandoned for exactly the
> above reasons.
... but it is the idea which is being applied almost anywhere else.

Ask yourself: Is the current development model in Fedora a success?

I don't think so.

- Fedora releases essentially are rawhide snapshots. Packages from
rawhide automatically become "stable" (Lack of "rawhide/testing"). E.g.
I have package upgrades pending, I currently don't want to push to
Fedora, because I fear them to be too unstable for a product.

- Fedora's release process starves package development. E.g. I have
several (upstream) package upgrades pending, I can't push to Fedora
because to the freezes are permanently interfering.

- rawhide is too volatile to be usable for many testers, esp. packagers
testing their packages.

- The current process introduces a bloated bureaucracy to work around
the side-effects of "not-branches".

Ralf