On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 15:43 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Multiple times a release cycle. Particularly if we're going
to be
> working on things like new initrd creation systems and new init systems.
See above - you can always boot last week's kernel. Breaking the initrd
generation can only screw up kernels that get installed *after* the
breakage. So just boot a kernel from before stuff got broken, then
generate a working initrd for the newer kernel manually.
that doesn't help when its the init system itself breaking, or anything
else in the bootpath that is outside of the initrd.
> 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.
Ok, then. But then, that's the sort of thing that having more people
using Rawhide should lead to happening less often. I don't think there's
really any intrinsic reason wireless drivers have to break very often in
a dev branch.
(And again, you usually have the option of booting a known-good kernel
in this case).
No, it means that somebody will notice and complain a tad bit earlier,
but they are still going to be broken. You're still relying on your
userbase as the early warning detection system.
> 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.
I think they're complementary. Automated testing is great, but it can
never catch everything, it's probably not really going to get close. And
automated testing should make Rawhide more reliable and hence help out
with this side of things (having more real fleshy people use it and yell
when stuff breaks). And there are people who can get involved in one
side but not the other (as you can see I have a great talent for poking
at difficult areas, but I couldn't write an automated test for
*anything*...)
I don't see why there needs to be an opposition, really. And this whole
idea about having more people run Rawhide doesn't involve any 'extra'
coding.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/jkeating