Fedora 12 QA retrospective - feedback needed

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 01:03 -0600, 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.

Jesse could answer that better; I don't know how secret sauce-y the
image build process is.

It is always worth posting the standard disclaimer we try and attach to
all RC-y stuff: the only thing you need the RC builds for is testing the
actual DVD/multi-CD composes, basically. If you just want to test the
bits, you can use a nightly live image or Rawhide install. If you want
to test the install process, you can do a network install from Rawhide,
which - as you surmise - gets you all the same bits that are in the RCs,
basically.

I did do quite a lot of spinning my own *live* builds during the late
stage of the release testing process, using the official desktop
kickstart and the hourly repositories, which meant I could get what was
basically an 'RC' live spin locally quite easily, using cached packages.
I didn't try building my own DVD compose, though.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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