Horst H. von Brand wrote:
The big problem for me is that it's a package deal. I wouldn't mind
beta testing a few apps at a time on my working system with a stable
OS and libraries, but to run them you also have to take an
experimental kernel and device drivers. And my history with those on
fedora is that I waste too much time getting the hardware to work with
new versions. Maybe that's changed... If you had a way to separate
the apps from the OS, you might find people more willing to test the
parts that interested them.
Many problems are integration problems, i.e., package version foo doesn't
work with library version bar. It also happens that to run the very
latest-and-greatest version of the package you need experimental(ish)
versions of other stuff.
Hence my initial suggestion of a ready-to-run, fully integrated vmware
image that anyone with a working mac, windows, or linux can fire up
nondestructively with no install or prep work.
Kernels that don't boot on machines where the last version worked
Keep the next-to-last one around just in case. Have a LiveCD of the lastest
stable/beta at hand for the case it gets too screwed up. Yes, it's a
nuisance.
If you want lots of testers, make it not a nuisance, safe, and
non-destructive.
But would you want to test a plane where the engineers said it was
probably good enough and didn't crash too often?
So you have never heard of plane crashes?
Yes, have you heard of simulators where you can do the preliminary
testing without danger? That's what vmware provides.
Or other failures? In the end, as
100% perfect is not realistically doable, you have to make do with "good
enough", and what /that/ means depends on the circumstances: The kernel of
a game console (a crash means a minor inconvenience or at most a lost game)
has /very/ different safety/security requirements than software controlling
a radiation therapy aparatus (which could very well be lethal to the
patient).
The circumstances are that vmware server/player is free, as is a timed
demo of fusion for the mac. A crash inside of vmware isn't even a minor
inconvenience to the host. And as fast as fedora betas change, it would
probably take less bandwidth and certainly less user time to keep fully
updated ready-to-run images available instead of making users download
isos than need installation and then updates.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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