Is It Worth Installing F9 Alpha?

Michael Schwendt mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam at arcor.de
Mon Mar 10 09:23:14 UTC 2008


On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:59:00 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> yum --skip-broken, occasionally an --exclude=brokenstuff, and there should be no 
> problem staying current unless

Both failed because a dependency-chain strictly required packages with
broken deps.
 
> > 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.
> 
> Thats not very accurate.. there is plenty of justification for testing it -- 
> there is just a different kind of testing needed.  Things are broken, *very* 
> broken, so how can that not need testing? 

As in "we know... we hope to have it fixed next month or so".
As in "this was probably fixed in rawhide, please update".
As in "F9 Alpha ships foo 1.0, F9 Beta probably will ship foo 2.0 anyway".
As in "yum update fubar, and it pulls in a huge chain of new deps from
rawhide because of soname bumps etc".

Conclusively, after a few days already, the tester no longer tests F9 Alpha,
but a rapidly changing collection of packages. Let's hope this will change
with the Beta release and the feature freeze.

> There is good reason for an 
> Alpha/Beta distinction,

Not if the changeset between the Alpha and the Beta release is too big
or of uncertain quality. Because you cannot freeze together with the
release of the Beta, which is a popular stage in the software release
life cycle, if previous development was too wild and fragile.




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