The future of "rawhide" (was [Fwd: Re: "What is the Fedora Project?"])

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> 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".

So as I understand it there are a number of reasons why rawhide might
not be installable, but broadly they fall into two major categories:

* Anaconda
* Critpath packages
  - Dependency/rebuild issues
  - Bugs in %posts (like the user/group one we ran into with dbus)
  - Core bugs (graphics drivers)

It seems like we're basically just skipping Anaconda, since you won't
be able to yum if there are depsolving issues (ok, modulo
--skip-broken), and for the latter two you don't end up with a
"working" system.

Let me do a counter-proposal:

We simply do not let showstopper regressions in the critpath stay in
rawhide.  If something in critpath has a showstopper, it halts all
further commits to the entire critpath until it's resolved (either
fixed, or reverted).  The definition of "showstopper" might be "AutoQA
fails".  And since AutoQA will have been doing some basic smoketesting
of the installer, we have to be producing installer images as a side
effect.