On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 14:38 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
1. Increase participation in Rawhide: it provides a huge benefit in
terms of identifying issues and having them fixed quickly and early in
the cycle.
Agreed - rawhide has a bad rep, and lots of people tend to avoid it. It
has been improving lately, but we should keep trying out new things to
get it to the stage that anyone involved in Fedora development should be
able to run rawhide.
Here's a snippet from an old email on time based release processes that
still really resonates with me when thinking about rawhide:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-June/msg00041.html
The goal of the unstable branch is to be an exciting and
forward-moving but USABLE BY TESTERS piece of software. This is just
the "release early, release often" principle.
...
The unstable branch must always be dogfood-quality. If testers can't
test it by using it daily, they can't make the jump. If the unstable
branch becomes too unstable, we can't release it on a reliable
schedule, so we have to start breaking the stable branch as a stopgap.
Here's a suggestion:
1) Come up with a rough definition of what it means for rawhide to be
considered "dogfoodable" - e.g. installs, boots, networking works,
desktop and core apps usable, etc. etc.
2) Create a RawhideBlocker tracker bug - add anything to it that
breaks something on the dogfoodable list
3) Post details to fedora-devel-list of any new bug added to
RawhideBlocker, cc-ing the package owners
4) Harass package owners, and encourage others to help, until the
issue is resolved
5) Keep the list small, so that "OMG, it's blocking rawhide" is a
real incentive for people to sort problems out. If the list grows
too long, consider lowering the dogfoodable bar.
Cheers,
Mark.