RawhideBlocker [was Re: QA group activities + goals discussion]

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:52:38 -0800,
  Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> Sure. Stuff breaks in development branches. This is why all instructions
> relating to Rawhide specifically state that you should install it on a
> test system, test partition, or test virtual machine. So that when it
> breaks you can shrug and go 'oh, well' rather than screaming and going
> 'NOOOOoooo, my precious work!'

I still curse, but usually because it happens when I wanted to do something
and stupidly did an update just before then. I haven't lost data because
of using rawhide in a long time, and then happened when I accidentally
installed to the wrong partition when I was doing a lot of rawhide installs to
help track down a driver problem.

> We're not really talking about 'normal users' running Rawhide, anyway.
> We're talking about people who are interested in helping improve release
> quality and testing bleeding-edge code, who can at least work a text
> editor from a console, and have the flexibility to understand that
> Rawhide stuff *will* break occasionally and they'll have to work around
> it.

I think people need to be able to significantly more than use a text
editor. You need to be able to rescue your system when booting fails.
I think you pretty much need to be an amateur sysadm.

> The point is that this pool of people is in fact far larger than the
> number of people who currently run Rawhide. It should at least include
> the vast majority of packagers, yet from what I've seen, it seems that a
> lot of Fedora packagers only run stable releases, which is a pretty
> reliable indicator that we really could have more people running
> Rawhide.

I think going for the vast majority of Packagers might be overly optimistic.
Besides needing sysadm skills, you also need good bandwith.