Not sure if this went through either so forwarding as requested. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> Date: Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 15:50 Subject: Re: What do rawhide testers want and expect? To: Development discussions related to Fedora <devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: smooge@xxxxxxxxx [ I'm not directly subscribed to devel, so this may not go through; if so, Stephen, can you forward it on if it seems worthwhile? ] On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:57:34 -0600 Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What do the people who are > using rawhide day-in/day-out expect out of the channel? What level of > pain does someone like Jonathan Corbet expect and how can we better > serve them? FWIW, I've been running Rawhide for many years. I've found it to be a good early warning system for what's coming, a good way to easily mess with current software, and, often, just fun. It's also a decent platform for kernel development and a way to, hopefully, help push things forward by finding and reporting bugs in the distribution. I fully expect it to break occasionally; I'm prepared for that and know how to recover. In the last year or two I'm finding that Rawhide is not as useful to me and not as much fun. Things break more often, and they tend to stay broken for a long time. I don't remember when gnucash last worked, for example; the bug I filed has not gotten a great deal of attention. The fact that X was broken for a long time and nobody seemed to care spoke volumes to me. I've been told several times now that Fedora developers don't bother with the "Rawhide dumping ground" and that I should be running the next-release branched version. Sometimes it seems like I'm about the only person left. That may be exaggerated, but it is clear that "no frozen Rawhide" has translated to "wilder and slower-to-fix Rawhide with fewer users." As a result, I have, for a little while now, been thinking about moving on to something else. I don't know what the value of $SOMETHING_ELSE is yet, but it may well not be Fn+1. I need a sustained period where I'm not in an airplane - or preparing to get into an airplane - to figure that out. Naturally, Rawhide doesn't exist to make my life easier or more interesting. When I raised a similar issue some months ago, the responses suggested that, for Fedora developers, it's doing what it's supposed to do and that they were happy. So perhaps there's nothing really wrong with Rawhide, even if it no longer quite fills the niche that it once did. Thanks, jon -- Stephen J Smoogen. "The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance." Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. "Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle." -- Ian MacLaren -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
