Raising the bar

[Bill McGonigle]

On 06/29/2009 04:28 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:

> Making it easy for a wide audience to participate without requiring a
> rawhide installation is certainly a goal. We will have live cds
> available for the test days, just like you know from other Fedora test
> days. As soon as live cd creation works again on rawhide...

As is, this is of limited value.  I did some test days on F11 using
LiveCD's, and reported a bunch of bugs.  I was then unable to
participate in follow-up testing to give the developers feedback on my
specific hardware for quite a while because there were no updated CD's.

I finally caved and converted the system to rawhide, which I'm unlikely
to do on my primary work machine again, as there were several problems
in F11 which kept me from getting PayingJob done when I needed to.

If I had to do it again, I'd probably attempt to get the machine to boot
from a USB-connected hard disk.  But each of these "just" steps greatly
reduces the available tester base.

So, rolling LiveCD's would be a huge boon for testers who need to test
on rawhide.

If the project is truly concerned about getting the most feedback, one
strategy would be to collect feedback on the most current release and
have people running rawhide verify the report on rawhide.  It's extra
work, but it's also division of labor.  If testers don't have to spend
time fighting rawhide, they can spend more time testing.  A
resource-allocation game, to be sure, with multiple valid first-guesses
as to the optimum strategy.

Also, a Bugzilla keyword 'polish' like Mozilla uses would be very useful
for tagging.

I think it's great the project is being tackled.  "Thank you" to those
involved.

-Bill

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