(I'm really glad this topic has come up - I think it's critically important....) On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 00:19 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: > Clyde E. Kunkel wrote: > > Maybe there needs to be a classification for rawhide similar to the > > karma system for updates-testing, but limited to just a set of packages > > that should just always work (maybe openssh would be one). > > We cannot do any useful development [[with that system]] I mostly agree with this, if karma is used in general as a gating mechanism as with release. However, if we think about the general principle of karma - getting some transparency about which packages / packagers are releasing broken - I think that's a useful thing to track. I don't see that as being a way of assigning blame or anything like that, but highlighting the areas which are particularly problematic. > We just need people to grasp that Rawhide is NOT suitable for any sort of > production use and that it WILL break. (Not "may", "will"!) As they say: > "Rawhide eats babies!" This, I totally disagree with. Without any expectation that Rawhide should work, there is even less incentive for anyone to use it to test it. I view this as entirely equivalent to having a rule about not breaking trunk in version control: I don't know anyone who seriously argues that breaking a project compile is a good thing. Breaking the OS should be culturally identical - that it's a "development branch" or whatever is totally irrelevant. The crucial reasoning here is that rawhide is a shared resource. Sure, people using rawhide ought to know roughly how to fix stuff when it breaks - but that imposes a maintenance burden on everyone who gets a broken update. Having a generally-usable rawhide would do much to improve quality in Fedora, because more subtle errors - or bugs limited to certain sub-populations - will get picked up much earlier. If rawhide is not suitable for "production use", that means it will get virtually no real-life use, and while rwmj's points about VM testing are well-taken, it's not a real shake-down. Actual use by technically competent real users is crucial for quality, and having to wait until alpha/beta for large numbers of those users to try the software really is too late in the day. Cheers Alex. -- This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean. http://www.betterhosted.com -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
