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On 04.11.2012 01:32, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
While I'm not (yet) a package maintainer, I'm a regular reader of various fedora lists, and I've been using exclusively rawhide on my machine (Lenovo T400) for the past year, for anything from normal desktop usage to various scientific/programming stuff, in particular C++/Qt/OpenGL, some Gtk and also AVR microcontroller stuff. I though I'd briefly summarize my experiences:So, I have been thinking about rawhide. I agree identifying the problems/issues would be good, and I think there's something we can do to help with that: Get a nice group of at least 10 or so folks who are active on this list to agree to run it full time on their main machine. As we get close to F18 release, I am considering moving my full time laptop to rawhide. If I can get a group of folks to do likewise we can at least identify issues faster and help each other as they come up. Additionally, if some number of these folks who pledge to run rawhide full time were provenpackagers we could just go in and fix things as they hit (or soon after) instead of waiting a while for fixes to go out. I've run a rawhide vm/test machine here for many years. It's hit it's share of problems, but none were insurmountable. Some of them might have been for folks who were not more experienced tho, so increasing communication around rawhide can only help, IMHO. Additional thoughts to help rawhide: - It's been suggested before, but could we practically keep N and N-1 packages in rawhide repos? Then 'yum downgrade' becomes much more handy. Repodata size and mirror size might shoot that down though. - Autoqa could perhaps help out, but I am not holding my breath. ;) - Anaconda folks haven't wanted rawhide installer images as they cause people to report bugs on things when not ready, etc. However, could we build nightly cloud images at least? Those could help test things and won't require hitting the installer path. - I'm sure there's more ideas to improve it... I really think if we get a pool of savvy folks running it day to day we should at least be able to identify the pain points. In my experience with my test machine, rawhide has been pretty boring for the last two cycles, if we can continue to make it so, perhaps the rolling release folks might be able to find it usable. kevin - The experience greatly depends on the desktop environment. Very early Gnome development packages are released to the wild (and hence end up in rawhide) very soon, which can cause major problems. On the other hand, KDE for instance only releases builds starting from usually quite usable betas. While previous rawhide installations on Gnome were often quite challenging to maintain, I've had very few DE-related issues in the past year as a KDE user. - My rule number one is: never reboot before any important presentations :) I've had the occasional boot-related issue. While enforcing=0 was often part of the solution, systemd and dracut related issues were the most difficult ones to work-around to have the system booting again. - I always exclude the kernel from the updates, and usually only update to kernel-*-rc3+ without debugging options (simply because KDE is terribly sluggish with debugging options). - Broken dependencies are occasionally somewhat of a pain, one issue which already came up on this list a while ago is the occasional version discrepancy between branched and rawhide. In general, I end up rebuilding a couple of packages a week manually to have all updates apply (have written a nice rebuild.sh script for that;)). Occasionally, some manual patching is necessary. - I have clean_requirements_on_remove = 1 in yum.conf, and also have installed yum-plugin-show-leaves, which makes it fairly easy to keep the installation tidy. I guess that's about it. In general I must say that I've found rawhide to be definitely more than just usable! Sandro |
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