On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 14:32 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
Email breaking is rather unlikely. I don't think there's many
people
left who keep all their actual email in a single client and cross their
fingers that it won't break. Everyone uses some kind of remote server -
mostly, let's face it, GMail these days (though die-hards like me are
still running their own IMAP server, or using their ISP's, or
something). In that case you can usually use any one of several dozen
client apps to access your email, or the web interface.
The mail may still be accessible, but all the flagged mail and the
search folders and such that help me do my job are lost when Evolution
stops working (which is often). That makes a serious dent in my ability
to get stuff done. Same when my calendar can't be brought up. I miss
appointments etc...
How often does Rawhide really fail to boot? I mean, really? So bad that
you can't fix it with a single kernel parameter or booting last week's
kernel or something? This is part of the reputation inflation thing I'm
wondering about. It just doesn't match my experience of dev branches.
Multiple times a release cycle. Particularly if we're going to be
working on things like new initrd creation systems and new init systems.
This system's wireless. Been through a dozen kernel updates and it
hasn't broken yet. Didn't break on Mandriva the whole time I was running
that. And, hey, if the native driver breaks - you've always got
ndiswrapper. Flexibility.
In previous rawhide cycles wireless has frequently broken, both driver
and software to manage it. There were also days when the vpn software
didn't work for various reasons.
Look, obviously dev branches are always going to be less stable and
break more often than stable releases, so obviously there's consequently
people who really need to run stable releases. Some of these people are
developers. I just remain unconvinced that it's really the case that
everyone who could sensibly run Rawhide, already is. I continue to
believe that we could have a lot more people - both developers and
testers - running Rawhide on *some* system at least, and this would
improve the quality of Rawhide and hence of releases.
I don't disagree with that. I'm just not going to paint a picture where
using rawhide as your main system won't lead to downtime and lost
productivity. And as many people state, we're not going to find those
important bugs until somebody does use it as their main system, either
rawhide, a snapshot, or the final release.
I'm more convinced that we'll get far faster/better results by investing
more time/effort/code into the automated testing system.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/jkeating