Hi, For a while I've been thinking about rawhide stability. I know we all love to say how it eats babies and it's really easy to tell someone "I told you so" when they try rawhide and complain that it's broken. But I'd like to start a discussion about whether or not it's possible --or even worth it -- to maintain a relatively stable rawhide (and yes, I realize the term and/or the situation may be changing with the merge). I work on Eclipse stuff and one of the key features of the development of Eclipse is that things should be continuously consumable. Nightly builds are done and large test suites are run daily. The results are always available and I've heard some people who weren't previously involved with any open source projects say that "Open source is public humiliation" :) . People try hard to ensure that things are always buildable and while things aren't always perfect, weekly builds are almost always at least testable. You can read more about this process at the links at the bottom. I can hear you now: "This is an unfair comparison; we don't have giant test suites and it's not even possible to test everything in the distro working together!" And you're right: it _is_ a completely unfair comparison. And please don't think I'm picking on the kernel - 'cause I'm not. But I want to see what good parts of the Eclipse development process we can bring over to Fedora. For example, how do we expect users to help out with testing if rawhide is regularly in a completely unusable state? Is there something we can do to drive towards more continuous stability? Is this even possible? Should we instead focus on making more frequent (weekly?) releases in between actual test releases? Are better tools (such as a better bug tracking system, a better delivery mechanism, more effective communication media, a better means of working with different upstream projects, etc.) the answer to more stability? Can we achieve stability while still pushing the latest technology? Am I completely nuts for attempting to draw any comparisons between Eclipse and Fedora? I look forward to people's thoughts on these issues. Andrew Just a few samples describing some of the Eclipse processes: http://eclipsecon.org/2005/presentations/econ2005-eclipse-way.pdf http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=43 http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=113 http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t20805.html
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