live CD/DVDs for test releases

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 13:14:13 -0500,
  Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 11 November 2006 13:06, Karsten Wade wrote:
> > The live CD concept allows us to create more than one set of packages to
> > test.  It is true that it would exclude other packages that are worth
> > testing on the same system, but it opens the possibility for
> > sub-projects to issue a special live CD just for testing e.g. Fedora
> > Directory Server or the latest KDE packages.
> 
> Live CD/DVDs would be invaluable in getting more testing of A) the liveCD 
> creation tools, and B) the packages themselves.  However it does not help to 
> test anaconda and installation / upgrades.  Its the installation/upgrades 
> that had the most 'whoops' bugs in them and are the cause of most slips.  We 
> need more testing there, not less.

Telling people how to do their own respins might encourage more testing.
Once I found a script to do it, I found that respins aren't all that hard
to do. This allows you to test fixes since the last release without doing
a lot of work.
Personally, I am not likely to do much update testing, but I do keep spare
partitions around that makes testing installs relatively safe and painless.