Fedora 12 QA retrospective - feedback needed

[John Poelstra]

On 11/26/2009 07:59 AM, Jesse Keating wrote:
>
>
> On Nov 26, 2009, at 2:41, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at hi.is> wrote:
>
>> On 11/26/2009 07:03 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:15:30 -0800,
>>> Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> even despite that, public testing of RCs can _sometimes_ be useful, but
>>>> the problem is that if we publicise them any more than they're already
>>>> publicised, the single server on which they're located will bog down
>>>> and
>>>> stop people who really need them from getting them fast enough. And
>>>> given the time constraints, it's practically impossible to mirror or
>>>> torrent them usefully.
>>>>
>>> Would providing detailed documentation for people to build these images
>>> using a small amount of data from releng and the rest from public (or
>>> local)
>>> mirrors be worth the effort to set up? This is a higher bar than dealing
>>> with a complete image and there may not be enough people who take
>>> advantage
>>> of it to be worth the effort. I am also not sure if the process is
>>> repeatable
>>> so as to get bit for bit accuracy from private spins. But it does
>>> seem there
>>> should be a way to pull most of the data for the image from mirrors
>>> rather
>>> than from releng's server.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> That wont work we need to make sure all the testers are testing the same
>> bits hence it's best that we create and hand out the images.....
>>
>
> That's what beta, which used to be named preview, is for. It is the
> image we sync out to the world. The RCs come shortly after and fix
> anything critical found in the beta. RCs are fast and furious, no chance
> in mirroring and waiting days for feedback.
>

Do we say this directly anywhere in our docs... spell out the purpose 
for Alpha and Beta?

I'm trying to pull more of this stuff together so we have a a canonical 
place to point people to explaining how our release processes work.

John