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

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 09:50 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> Hi all.  It has been brought to my attention that my description of my
> future vision of rawhide as explained here is much clearer than previous
> attempts (including the current "no frozen rawhide" wiki page).  So I
> felt it prudent to forward it along to the devel list for more eyes to
> look upon it and comment if desired.

I have two particular nits with it. One, it's pretty unwieldy,
especially for part time maintainers (thinking how many hoops we'll have
to jump through just to keep our packages up to date). Having to jump
through the Bodhi hoops every time we just want to put a trivial update
into a release that won't be coming out for five months feels like a
pain. I'd worry about a lot of stuff going stale and smelly in the
middle of the Bodhi process somewhere as maintainers lose track of where
the hell they're up to with the four releases they have to cope with
(the last two already-released releases, the upcoming release, and
"rawhide").

Two, it makes testing things a bit more complex. Those of us who like to
test upcoming stuff in real use - i.e. on our main machines - will have
to choose whether to test "rawhide", in which case we'll have more pain
to deal with ourselves and won't be contributing as much to testing of
the next stable release, or test the next stable release, in which case
we aren't helping maintainers by making sure the stuff they're putting
in "rawhide" isn't totally broken.

But overall, the positives could certainly outweigh the negatives. Just
thought I'd flag up the two major concerns I have in case anything could
be done about them.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net