What is rawhide for?

Antonio Olivares olivares14031 at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 17 18:05:40 UTC 2008


--- On Tue, 6/17/08, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:

> From: Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net>
> Subject: Re: What is rawhide for?
> To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases" <fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2008, 7:44 AM
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Frank Murphy
> <frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > Maybe reduce rawhide release(s) to weekly and date?
> > eg: yum-3.2.16-2.fc9.061608.noarch.rpm
> >
> > So more testing can be accomplished
> >
> 
> I've always felt that the alpha/beta/pre releases provide good well  
> known
> starting points for the Rawhide adventure.  You can be
> reasonably certain
> that those points will install on your system.  From there
> you can update
> yourself in part or in whole to Rawhide de jour in order to
> verify operation
> of a particular piece of software or subsystem.  It is true
> that bugs
> contained within the alpha/beta don't really matter
> much past the rawhide
> day that these were snapshot from.  If the bug persists
> into the current
> rawhide version of the given package then it does matter,
> but there is often
> a chance that it's been fixed along the way.
> 
> --

I think that daily snapshots are overkill, but to wait for an installable iso(s) only to be (alpha/beta/pre releases) does not help much, the boot iso is the only one that is being updated and have network installs in which the mirrors do not collaborate. 

A well documented install from the mirrors with just boot iso, will be a good thing.  I would try this when I get back to work in late August/early September when that time comes and someone is nice enough to provide precise information to do an install that way forgetting about the traditional releases and the new alpha/beta/pre release stuff.  

Also, instead of daily snapshots of an installable fedora rawhide tree, how about weekly snapshots?  It might help people install rawhide after updates that did not allow previous installations to take place due to bugs that did not allow the install program(anaconda) to finish its work.  

I think that the beauty of rawhide is release fast, release often, report bugs, fix X, Y breaks, fix Y, X breaks again, so back to X and so on.  I am not running rawhide now as I would like to, I do not have a fast connection like I do at work and will wait to continue my rawhide adventure.  I only had two machines running rawhide and before the release of Fedora 9, I moved an aging Fedora 7 release to rawhide (with some troubles) but it worked out nicely in the end, and a Fedora 8 machine that froze all the time, moved it to Pre-Release and it started working fine (not freezing like it did on Fedora 8) so I am a happy camper and I believe in rawhide.  I got in the boat because I really like Fedora and believe in its goals, *not everything* I must clarify, but the people involved on this lists are fantastic.  They are most of the time willing to give solutions/workarounds to problems that arise when bad things do happen while running rawhide.  

One strange thing that happened to me was when Fedora 7 was released, the programs pointed to a Fedora 7 straight release and deviated from Rawhide.  Rawhide repo became disabled and I proceeded.  Then my hard drive died out, so I reinstalled pre 7 test release and updated straight into rawhide again and when Fedora releases a final product, I change back to rawhide on that machine  I am very comfortable running it that I did not felt a need to run the regular Fedora on that machine.  At home though I do run a regular Fedora, currently a Fedora 9 x86_64 machine, but since I have slow connection, I have to pick and choose which updates I install.  But I do miss the fun of running rawhide during the summer months.

Regards,

Antonio 


      




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