Testing test releases: do not update

[Gene C.]

On Friday 27 February 2004 01:39, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 3) Decide that this beta testing business is to risky for them
>    and decide to wait until the final release instead, because
>    they want a stable OS and can't risk nasty bugs or data loss.  
>    Nobody should ever run any beta or test release on a
>    production system ever.

Mike -- I suggest that there is another option and that is to not use the 
early ("alpha") snapshots but wait for the later ones ... the ones which are 
more analogous to what was available in public beta in the previous process.

As others have pointed out, with the new more open process all users are being 
exposed to the rough edges which previously were hidden from most users and 
only encountered by the limited set of private testers.

I am now in the process of reinstalling the FC2-T1 snapshot (which will then 
be carefully updated to current rawhide) because the updates I applied 
yesterday made my test system unusable (root partition hosed for some 
reason).  Was this expected ... no.  Was I surprised ... no.  Am I annoyed 
... not really.  This is all part of early testing.  Fortunately for me I 
keep all of the accumulated updates I apply in a local repository which I use 
to apply updates to my test systems ... it will be time consuming but I 
should be able to apply the fixes in a selective manner to help identify the 
package causing the problem.

In hindsight, the test process (early snapshots are alpha, later snapshots are 
beta, development/rawhide are current updates) should have been described so 
that users would have a better idea of what to expect.
-- 
Gene