faq? rawhide

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Ben Hsu wrote:

>This might be an FAQ, but I couldn't find anything in Google.
>
>How DOES one use rawhide packages? Is it just a matter of ftp'ing them
>and installing them, or is there a 'better' way? Would it help if I
>ponyed up the cash for RHN?

In some cases rawhide packages can be installed on the current OS 
release, and they may or may not work, but often they do.  There 
are never any guarantees however, and the risk is entirely in the 
hands of the user.  Rawhide is developmental so it's intended for 
development and it can and will break in various ways randomly, 
sometimes catastrophically.  Don't use it or it's packages at all 
if that risk is too much for your system or data.

At the present time, the best way of using rawhide, is to install 
the Severn beta release, and then upgrade to current rawhide 
using up2date or yum.  It's a beta release of course, and rawhide 
is very experimental, so it's not intended for production use, 
and many things definitely will be highly likely to be unstable.

Paying for RHN will provide you with higher speed access to RHN,
and provide access even when the server is very busy, but it
won't really affect your ability to use rawhide either way.  
Rawhide is available for everyone beta-testing packages to use
wether they're paying for RHN or not.

Hope this helps.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat