On 2/28/06, Charles Curley <charlescurley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > A good point. How about renaming the repository? "Rawhide" does not > convey anything about the stability or usefulness of the > contents. Something like "Unstable" or "Testing" or "BleedingEdge" or > "UseAtYourOwnRiskDammit" would at least convey something. 1) rawhide is just a nickname at this point. the tree is named "development" in the mirrors and in the yum configuration files. 2) I very seriously doubt changing thre tree name will change the word-of-mouth behavior which drives people to imply that the test releases and the development tree updates are stable. 3)The necessary boiler plate to inform users of the development tree, exists in the fedora-devel.repo file as a lengthy comment, which no one will ever actually read. 4) The underlying problem is the average package quality in the development tree is too good leading up to a final release. This leads to inflated expectations from novice testers who walk into the ongoing testing process. They then write personal testimonials of the stability of the tree, based on their very narrow personal experience, which mislead other people into thinking the tree will be "stable" for other people regardless of details in terms of the configuration and hardware they tested, skewing the expectations of any potential tester. 5)The solution to the problem of inappropriately high-expectations on the development tree is obviously to delibrately poison the development tree on a more regular basis, instead of doing it just after a final release is out the door. The key to projecting an image of progress to the unwashed is low expectations.. not higher standards. The more broken the development tree feels on a daily basis, to a tester who isn't fully invested in the true nature of the development process and wants to continue to falsely believe that there is an attainable monotonicly increasing ideal of stability which can be applied to the development tree, the more astonishing a working final release will appear to them. I can scream that the development tree will eat your children and destroy not only your data but your neighbor's data until I'm blue in the face... but for people who don't want to hear the warning.. they will choose not to hear the warning... and the only way for them to learn is to actually have rawhide eat their data. So i say.. every week there should be a delibrate package update in the development tree which destroys data. Thrown into the package pool at random, with an appropriate changelog entry so those of us who read the daily rawhide reports will know exactly which package to exclude. -jef"tough love"spaleta /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-devel.repo # These packages are untested and still under development. This # repository is used for updates to test releases, and for # development of new releases. # # This repository can see significant daily turn over and can see major # functionality changes which cause unexpected problems with other # development packages. Please use these packages if you want to work # with the Fedora developers by testing these new development packages. # # fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx is available as a discussion forum for # testing and troubleshooting for development packages in conjunction # with new test releases. # # fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx is available as a discussion forum for # testing and troubleshooting for development packages in conjunction # with developing new releases. # # Reportable issues should be filed at bugzilla.redhat.com # Product: Fedora Core # Version: devel -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list