So, today is the Fedora 32 Beta release date. If you examine the release announcement: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-the-release-of-fedora-32-beta/ and the current state of the download site: https://getfedora.org/ there are three fairly significant things entirely missing. Those three things are the things that getfedora.org calls our 'Emerging Fedora Editions' - the things that are allegedly the 'future of Fedora': IoT, CoreOS and Silverblue. This is approximately how I currently understand things regarding those editions: 1) Silverblue - this is kind of the simplest. Silverblue is built as part of the regular Fedora composes. Silverblue image builds failed in the actual Beta compose, which was unfortunate but not release-blocking as SB is not yet tagged release-blocking, so the Beta we signed off has no SB images. At the go/no-go and readiness meetings, IIRC, we agreed a rough plan that we would nominate images from a nightly compose built after the packages in Beta had been pushed stable to release alongside the Beta. https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/branched/Fedora-32-20200314.n.0/compose/Silverblue/ should work fine for that purpose, but it seems not everything necessary to actually get that plan implemented has happened, at least not yet - I see no mention of this in the release announcement or on getfedora.org . 2) IoT - as I've been trying to annoy people about for a few weeks now, IoT is not built as part of our main 'Fedora' composes: https://pagure.io/fedora-iot/issue/24 this is a significant difference from just about everything else in Fedora. We have several of these kinda 'variant' composes, but the others are only used to do nightly builds of specific images for stable releases *after* the release happens. For Rawhide and Branched releases, those images are built in the main 'Fedora' compose. IoT is the first and only thing (aside from CoreOS...which we'll get to in a minute) which is being built outside of the 'Fedora' compose for Branched and Rawhide. This means we don't have IoT images in the Beta compose or indeed in any of the main Fedora 32 Branched composes and it falls effectively entirely outside the existing processes for testing and releasing stuff. That wouldn't be a problem if IoT were some unimportant thing we didn't care about, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It also wouldn't be a problem if this had all been figured out ahead of time and a plan had been put in place for how exactly we were going to validate and ship IoT releases, but that doesn't seem to have been the case either. I keep filing tickets and bugging people and there have been some back channel discussions and things, and a few of us as individuals are making up a validation process as we go along as best as we can, but there doesn't seem to be anything on paper aside from https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/iot/edition-promotion/ , which doesn't really address QA and release process stuff much and seems to be rather old. As far as F32 Beta goes, again we roughly decided at Go/No-Go and readiness to identify a specific compose that 'matched' Beta and ship the bits from that - https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/iot/Fedora-IoT-32-20200314.0/compose/IoT/ would seem to fit the bill, and pwhalen has done validation testing on it at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pwhalen/QA/IoT/Fedora-IoT-32-20200314.0 , but again this plan doesn't seem to have got as far as getfedora.org or the Beta release announcement. 3) CoreOS - CoreOS is just a *whole* other thing. It is not built like the rest of Fedora at all. It's not built as Pungi composes, whatever compose process it does have doesn't run alongside our other compose processes or output to the same locations, it's like a whole other product. It also doesn't seem to be terribly well documented (I can't find any detail on the wiki, docs sites, or any of the git repos I happen to know of) or even introspectable - for instance, ISO locations look like https://builds.coreos.fedoraproject.org/prod/streams/stable/builds/31.20200223.3.0/x86_64/fedora-coreos-31.20200223.3.0-live.x86_64.iso , but if you try and browse around that tree by visiting URLs like https://builds.coreos.fedoraproject.org/prod/streams/ , you just get 'Access Denied'. So if the process appears to have broken down and some poor monkey like me is left trying to help people figure out where they can get a 'Fedora CoreOS 32' image to try - it isn't very easy. Right now I simply have no clue if there is something you could reasonably call 'Fedora CoreOS 32 Beta' or a decent analogue of it. So, in practical terms for Fedora 32 Beta: it would be good if we could complete the plan of identifying SB and IoT nightly images to place alongside the Beta release, and update getfedora.org (and maybe the Beta release announcement) to refer to these. For CoreOS, it would be good if we could...I don't know...do something? To call something 'Fedora CoreOS 32 Beta' and let people install it? Or at least explicitly say that there isn't one for $REASONS? In wider terms: I've been bugging specific people/teams about this in less public channels for a while now, but mattdm said I can be more annoying about it, so now I'm gonna bug people about it in these more public channels! For our so-called Emerging Editions (especially IoT and CoreOS, Silverblue pretty much gets a pass here) - the 'future of Fedora' - we need better process than this. We need more bureaucracy than this! I know bureaucracy isn't exciting and there are always 'real' problems to fix instead. I know our existing compose/test/release process is old-fashioned and unwieldy and monolithic and takes forever. But it has the advantage that it is a complete, end-to-end, more-or-less-fully- documented process that all the teams involved understand. The developers of the existing Editions (and other spins/labs), releng, QA, websites and communications folks all understand the existing sausage factory and all the bits are joined up well enough that when we push the big red button, everything works. The bits get built, the release validation process kicks in, the bits get tested. The Beta release announcement talks about Workstation and Server and the spins and labs. getfedora.org provides download links for them. I totally get that the existing process can be constricting and it's reasonable to want to do things a little differently (IoT) or a lot differently (CoreOS). But if we're gonna do that *and make these things important parts of Fedora and not just sandbox projects*, then we need to start working on making the new way of doing things as well-oiled and integrated with other teams as the old way of doing things. The new processes doen't just have to work for the team that are making the things, they have to work for other teams all the way down the line so that this kind of situation doesn't happen; there needs to be clarity on how we are actually going to build and validate and ship and announce these things. It doesn't have to work the same way we've been doing it the last few years at all. We can experiment with different schedules for different editions, we can experiment with different release approaches that make sense for different products, we can do all kinds of stuff. But in order to do it properly, we need better process. Some specific ideas: FESCo and/or the Council should be taking a stronger lead here. I'd view the Fedora.next process as a good model for this. In Fedora.next there was a really strong model set up for how we were going to create these 'Editions': every Edition had to have a PRD and a tech spec, every edition had to be built and tested and shipped together in the same release process, we had to have release criteria and validation testing for every edition, and all the editions had to be presented together with good strong unified branding on download pages and so on. The whole process of bootstrapping the editions was extensively tracked with issues and meetings and regular status updates and all of that kind of stuff. FESCo kept strong lines of communication between the teams working on the editions and teams like releng and QA and websites and docs so that everyone understood what was happening and what the schedules were and what needed to be done by when. This is what I feel like we're missing with these 'emerging Editions'. I like that as a catch-all for these three things that are obviously important to Fedora's future, but right now all it seems to be is a phrase on the download page. There doesn't seem to be a process for how an 'emerging Edition' becomes a fully-fledged Fedora edition and takes its place alongside (or replaces one of) our existing ones. I can't, for instance, find a FESCo or Council ticket somewhere for 'Fedora IoT becoming an official Edition' where the concrete things necessary to make that actually happen are defined and tracked. No-one has really come to a QA meeting and said "hey, so we have this idea to make IoT and CoreOS fully-fledged, release-blocking Fedora editions in future, how do you think that would look from a QA perspective? What needs to happen? Want to come to a FESCo meeting and talk about it?" and then followed up on it, IIRC. All of that happened for the initial Fedora.next process. I've had various conversations like that informally with individual people, but there is no paper trail, little of it seems to be written down anywhere, and it seems to be very easy for different people to have different understandings of what's going on and what the current status of things is and what the future expectations are. I just went through the last two months of meeting logs for FESCo - https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/teams/fesco/ - and the Council - https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/teams/council/ - and unless I'm missing something, the string 'coreos' doesn't appear one time and the string 'iot' appears only in the word "Patriots" in a discussion of the NFL playoffs. This doesn't seem like how things ought to be. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ desktop mailing list -- desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
