Rawhide stability
Andrew Overholt
overholt at redhat.com
Wed Feb 21 21:08:46 UTC 2007
Hi,
For a while I've been thinking about rawhide stability. I know we all
love to say how it eats babies and it's really easy to tell someone "I
told you so" when they try rawhide and complain that it's broken. But
I'd like to start a discussion about whether or not it's possible --or
even worth it -- to maintain a relatively stable rawhide (and yes, I
realize the term and/or the situation may be changing with the merge).
I work on Eclipse stuff and one of the key features of the development
of Eclipse is that things should be continuously consumable. Nightly
builds are done and large test suites are run daily. The results are
always available and I've heard some people who weren't previously
involved with any open source projects say that "Open source is public
humiliation" :) . People try hard to ensure that things are always
buildable and while things aren't always perfect, weekly builds are
almost always at least testable. You can read more about this process
at the links at the bottom.
I can hear you now: "This is an unfair comparison; we don't have giant
test suites and it's not even possible to test everything in the distro
working together!" And you're right: it _is_ a completely unfair
comparison. And please don't think I'm picking on the kernel - 'cause
I'm not. But I want to see what good parts of the Eclipse development
process we can bring over to Fedora.
For example, how do we expect users to help out with testing if rawhide
is regularly in a completely unusable state? Is there something we can
do to drive towards more continuous stability? Is this even possible?
Should we instead focus on making more frequent (weekly?) releases in
between actual test releases? Are better tools (such as a better bug
tracking system, a better delivery mechanism, more effective
communication media, a better means of working with different upstream
projects, etc.) the answer to more stability? Can we achieve stability
while still pushing the latest technology? Am I completely nuts for
attempting to draw any comparisons between Eclipse and Fedora?
I look forward to people's thoughts on these issues.
Andrew
Just a few samples describing some of the Eclipse processes:
http://eclipsecon.org/2005/presentations/econ2005-eclipse-way.pdf
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=43
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=113
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t20805.html
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