>Rawhide - is it the staging ground for release candidates or is
it a
>communication point between a developer and those that are in contact
>with him? If it is the latter, then there needs to be another repository
>that indicates that a package is ready for global testing. If it is the
>former, than I wonder why an intermediate stage exists in the Core 1
>tree.
Rawhide is the current set of packages that were built
internally. The rough process, is this:
- Developer updates a package to a newer version, or fixes some
bugs, adds patches, whatever.
- Developer builds package locally on his workstation and does
whatever testing he deems necessary.
- Developer submits package into the buildsystem, telling it to
build the package into the Fedora Core 2 development tree.
- Once the package has been successfully built on all 7
architectures, the buildsystem accepts the package into the
internal Fedora Core 2 development tree.
The above process is how we update all of our packages during
development essentially. So what is rawhide then? Simple. Once
every day or so, a script is ran either automated or manually,
which takes all of the latest src.rpm and binary rpms in the
current internal Fedora Core development tree, and mirrors them
to our ftp staging server. The staging server then pushes the
rpms to the public ftp servers. This is called "rawhide".
There is zero QA testing done on any of the rawhide packages,
because they are not "production ready", they are "work in
progress, fresh off the press, caveat emptor, beware of large
dog" or as Jef Spaleta puts it "rawhide might kill babies".
Do not use rawhide if you can not accept the possibility of total
system meltdown and data destruction. While it does not occur
very often, it _CAN_ occur, and it does from time to time. ;o)
Thanks for the information. This is great stuff for a fedora testing
FAQ.