I was surprised that the "broken dependencies" list was only one level deep. The uninformed might look at that list, try to do an update, and see lots more broken dependencies than are listed. For example, "open office" being broken for quite some time based on a java dependency. That can make testing more confusing for the user. It certainly confused me at first, and I think of myself as a fairly experienced techie (perhaps not so with Fedora.)
I would venture the opinion that anything which eases the testing process for the users who volunteer to test rawhide will only help the project in the long run. Of course, the simple fact that the code itself may be broken makes the whole testing process not for the faint of heart.
Perhaps, though, certain minor tweaks could ease the process for the folks that do take up the yoke of rawhide. I think having a comprehensive list of broken packages (packages with broken dependencies) would be useful. It certainly communicates the full extent to which rawhide is foobar, rather than obscuring it in some core packages upon which many many things depend. If creating this comprehensive list is difficult, than perhaps a simple change to the automatic message which describes, clearly, that the list of "broken deps for x86_64" is not actually that. It is merely the first level of dependency recursion. I think at the very least, the current data is confusingly labeled.
I would go a bit farther to say that it would be helpful, to the testers, if the packages were actually signed. Maybe this has changed, but I've always expected that rawhide packages will not be signed. Therefore, I only download from the redhat ftp site. Any automated signing process would greatly assist people like me who won't download and install binaries from a third party mirror unless they are signed by redhat/fedora.
Just my thoughts; I appreciate the efforts of all involved.
Best regards,
Ben
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