Testing the development branch

[Rahul Sundaram]

Gene Heskett wrote:

> This is without a doubt true, and some are spread pretty thin.  That doesn't 
> change the fact that if I want to test the rawhide version of something, then 
> its dependency list should NOT require we pull in another 50 megs worth of 
> stuff, thereby breaking 1-3 other, in daily use, programs.  We would like to 
> test that particular program on our system, NOT test the rest of our system 
> against that program.  There is a rather large, and should be obvious, 
> difference between the two scenarios.

This is a fundamental although common misunderstanding of the 
development branch. Fedora development branch aka rawhide is NOT the 
place where you get latest stuff. It is the development branch leading 
to the next release.

Expecting to pull some latest packages without associated recent 
dependencies does not work well usually. If glibc gets a new performance 
improvement as it did in FC6 
(http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/fc6/en_US/sn-OverView.html#id2981260) 
all packages have to rebuilt to use the new feature. At that point the 
entire repository will rely on the new glibc.  Distributions rely on a 
central repository since individual programs. ABI incompatible releases 
are quite often in several upstream projects. This is not something any 
single distribution can change and is not Fedora specific.

If you want to test the development branch/test releases you need to 
dual boot or use on the numerous virtualization technologies (vmware, 
xen, kvm, qemu etc). There are other ways to participate in testing like 
use the updates-testing repository.

Rahul