Calming the BAD JOKE thread

[Jean Francois Martinez]

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 23:07, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Mar 30, 2004, Jean Francois Martinez <jfm512 at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> > But we expect to be able to install (even  some glitches) and to boot.
> 
> Based on what?  Part of the testing is exactly on the installer.  If
> you haven't been trying to install rawhide to report early problems
> that would make it to the test release otherwise, how would you expect
> people to know about them to fix them?

I can understand the installation breaking on a piece of
software the RedHat/Fedora people don't have or if I made something
unusual.  I cannot understand the installation breaking at the first
step on IDE disks or CDROMS (and booting from boot.iso): a test release
is made for people exploring the million alleys that Redhat/Fedora
people cannot explore, it is useless to have people stumble upon
a major problem you couldn't fail because it was just 1 yard after
exiting Redhat's garage.

> 
> > If we aren't able to do this, we will be frustrated and we will be
> > unable to provide any help in hunting bugs.
> 
> Well, being unable to install a test release is not the end of the
> world.  If you had the previous release installed, you can always keep
> on tracking rawhide until the next test release, that's coming soon,
> is out.  Meanwhile, be sure to test a rawhide install every now and
> then and report problems.
> 
> > want Fedora getting a bad name due to bad releases or betas who are
> > in pre-pre-alpha stage (see below before you get defensive on this)
> 
> Betas?  There aren't betas or alphas or pre-pre-alphas.  Fedora Core
> has test releases.
> 

See above for what is a test release.

> > 3) The boot.iso image is in a state who is completely unacceptable
> > even for a beta.  In normal times this would not be a major problem
> > since most people would install from CD and would not see it.  But
> > since many people have been unable to boot from CD they have stumbled
> > upon it.
> 
> boot.iso is just a small extract of the boot CD.  If the latter
> doesn't work, it's highly unlikely that the former will.  On the good
> side, fixing the former will probably fix the latter as well.
> 

I think I found why many of us were unable to boot (see my message
about recording software) and it is completely unrelated to the
particular file on CD1 who happens to contain an iso image who
is completely non-functional for the 99% of people who have IDE
disks.  And even if my explanation about the booting problem were
wrong we still could have a perfect FC2 CD installtion with
a completely broken boot.iso file or the opposite.  Both
problems are unrelated. 

> > It does not make FC2T2 a joke (ie I withdraw my words about
> > it) but as I said above boot.iso is in inacceptable state
> 
> Thanks.  Now let's work together to fix it.  That's what test
> releases, broken or not, are all about.
> 
> -- 
> Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
> Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
> Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
-- 
Jean Francois Martinez <jfm512 at free.fr>