Social Engineering of Rawhide

[Mike A. Harris]

Charles Curley wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 01:58:01PM +1000, Peter Tiggerdine wrote:
> 
>>   Testers & Developers,
>>   I think somewhere along the way netizens appear to think that Rawhide is
>>   stable ( or at least for public consumption).  I'd think we need to discuss
>>   how we can provide more constructive information  for developers and send a
>>   clear message to non-testers that Rawhide (a.k.a FC5 ) is not for general
>>   use.
> 
> 
> 
> A good point. How about renaming the repository? "Rawhide" does not
> convey anything about the stability or usefulness of the
> contents. Something like "Unstable" or "Testing" or "BleedingEdge" or
> "UseAtYourOwnRiskDammit" would at least convey something.

Technically, it was renamed 2 years ago to "Fedora Development", however
since the developmental repository for Red Hat Linux was named "rawhide"
for 8-10 years or so, the name rawhide has stuck in the minds of many
developers, and users.

One observation I've made though that this is changing slowly, is that
I haven't seen anyone file a bug report against rawhide in bugzilla for
a long time.  People are pretty much universally using "Fedora devel"
or one of the test versions when they file.

"Fedora development" conveys "use at own risk, this is unstable" quite
adequately IMHO.  At least as adequately as any other software project
out there which has a public development version.  During installation
a brief dialog pops up on screen to inform you it is a test version,
and not the full released OS.  You have to click "Install anyway" or
similar to proceed.

How much more blatant does it need to be?


-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.