new yum and apt conf ????

Jef Spaleta jspaleta at princeton.edu
Thu Nov 6 22:11:29 UTC 2003


> Hm, if I inspect my /etc dir, the up2date configuration does not point
> to rawhide (but fedora-update-released). Rawhide had been used during
> the beta as an intermediate solution. So a new fedor user should not
> suffer from those quirks with rawhide.

If you didnt touch your source list..and kept the default file..rpm updates it smoothly.
If on the other hand, you touched that file, and rpm notices its changed
(rpm -V up2date), then rpm plays nice with you and assumes you want to
keep your editting config in place and gives you the default file with a
.rpmnew  extention. RPM..so respectful of user choices...

> RedHatter did always said that on the lists. Someone who participates at
> the beta should know about that issue. So I think it is not that big
> problem.

I think several things make this beta somewhat different.
1) the name change to fedora during the beta phase means a lot of
curious and completely new people walked into the beta process without
running or experience redhat before. I don't think i can underestimate
the chaotic impact of the name change had on the userbase and the
potential userbase.

2) During this beta phase people actively knew they were eating rawhide,
and it was encouraged.  In the past, casual beta testers weren't
necessarily eating rawhide every day. The barrier to entry to getting
rawhide packages greatly decreased thanks to up2date's default configs
in 0.95...and people actively knew they were downloading rawhide. That
is a HUGE perception change for the casual tester. 

I would wager a lot of these people didn't even know rawhide existed 3
months ago or even 2 months ago. And in a month they might wish they
never had, if they don't have the proper respect for rawhide when new
tech is starting to show up in the tree. Upping python or perl or any
number of framework pieces of the distro is bound to break
things..addons particularly...and a lot of people who saw rawhide at its
most friendly, in a last stage of a beta, might not fully understand,
and I don't want people turned off to using fedora core in general,
because rawhide becomes rawer than they expected. And i want to make
sure as many venues as possible get used to communicate the fact that
rawhide has a cyclic nature. I'm not looking forward to having to deal
with people steaming mad because they upgraded from a test release to
core, and kept using rawhide unknowingly and started seeing what is in
their view 'unexpected' levels of breakage compared to what they saw
during test releases.

-jef""spaleta
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