Is It Worth Installing F9 Alpha?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:24:58 -0400, Robert L Cochran wrote:

> My impression is that there may not be that many testers of Fedora 9. Or
> at least, fewer people seem to be posting about Fedora 9 bugs.

Well, based on my own experience with F9 Alpha and Rawhide, I suspect that
X and a couple of other things don't boot/run at all anymore for many
testers.

For me, Rawhide had become so slow, it would hurt my motivation to use it
daily.

Then I downloaded and installed F9 Alpha with jigdo (which under my
constellation saved more than 50% of the download, but was not a download
method suitable for Joe User).

F9 Alpha at least installed and seemed to work at first, but still was
very slow at run-time. And with a high number of updates waiting to be
downloaded, testing is useless. I test something only to find out the next
upgrade breaks it already. I test something, and if I find a bug, I'm
asked to update from rawhide. As a tester, I'm either too fast or too late
with finding/reporting problems. Meanwhile I need to fiddle with broken
deps in the single repository which affect ordinary yum installs of
package-chains needed for test-compiling software. Fine if the primary
spin is free of broken deps, but the repository is broken.

One of the sporadic runs of "yum update" took more than three hours to
update 700 pkgs. And one of the update pkgs killed X, which means it ends
at a black screen when trying to start gdm or startx. It might be possible
to "fix" it with a fresh xorg.conf. But why even try that? F9 development
is a fast-moving target, known to be incomplete, known to be broken in
several areas, with no signs of a base that justifies efforts of testing
it.

> I wonder
> if momentum for the Fedora distro has slowed a bit? Fedora Core 1 seemed
> to have many testers...now Fedora 9 seems to have fewer folks out there.
> But then I may not be very observant.

Around 2004/2005 was the peek. The earlier Fedora Core 1 was the direct
successor of Red Hat Linux 9, but it took several months for more people
to learn about it and its implications and look for a replacement of their
RHL7.3/RHL9 machines.