The future of "rawhide" (was [Fwd: Re: "What is the Fedora Project?"])

Hi all. It has been brought to my attention that my description of my future vision of rawhide as explained here is much clearer than previous attempts (including the current "no frozen rawhide" wiki page). So I felt it prudent to forward it along to the devel list for more eyes to look upon it and comment if desired. Thanks! -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Jesse Keating <jkeating(a)redhat.com&gt; Reply-to: fedora-advisory-board(a)redhat.com To: fedora-advisory-board(a)redhat.com Subject: Re: "What is the Fedora Project?" Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:58:08 -0700 On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 20:35 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote: So my plans are really funny. I plan to make rawhide more unstable more of the time, and I plan to make "rawhide" more stable more of the time. Crazy eh? How can I do this? By splitting "rawhide" in two. Rawhide as we know it, /pub/fedora/linux/releases/development/ will remain "rawhide". We may even change the path to say rawhide, just to catch things up and well I like keeping mirrors on their toes. Rawhide will be a repository of developmental and experimental packages. Things being worked on for the future. It will /not/ be an installable tree, rather it will just be a repository of packages, to be added on to an already stable "base", eg you'd install F12, and enable rawhide to test rawhide. This will significantly lower the complaints that "rawhide isn't installable". The second face of rawhide, will be the "pending release", that is when it comes time to feature freeze a release, we'll split it away from rawhide. We'll publish to /pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/13-pending/ or some such. THIS tree will be installable. It will be composed each night, and we'll use bodhi to manage updates to this tree. That means this tree will have it's own "updates testing" where potential freeze breaks can be tested and commented on by all, but won't risk the base tree. If testing pans out, it'll get tagged for the release, if not it'll get thrown away. This tree will spawn 13-Alpha, 13-Beta, the snapshots in between, and eventually pub/fedora/linux/releases/13. Remember that first rawhide? Yeah, it kept going, unfrozen, leaping toward Fedora 14. You could still install 13-Alpha, or 13-pending, and enable/update to rawhide to start testing Fedora 14 stuff. What does this accomplish? It provides a very easy release valve. Instead of closing the valve and building up pressure while we freeze, and tempting people to push things into our pending release that really don't belong, we'll provide them a normal, never ending release of pressure, called rawhide. You can always find the latest stuff in rawhide, there is nothing newer (unless we make KoPeRs happen). We don't have to worry about "rawhide" being installable. We don't have to worry about people dumping highly experimental or developmental stuff in our pending release. We don't have to worry about the giant pile of builds for the next release building up while we polish the pending release. We don't have to worry about the giant pile of 0-day updates building up while we polish the pending release, as we'll be pushing these updates as we go. This is my vision on how to accomplish both a always active development stream, and a more stable pending release stream, keeping everybody happy. Want to help? I'll be at FUDCon Toronto discussing roadblocks to this vision and discussing why this vision sucks if anybody thinks that it does. Or just find me on IRC/email if you want to chat about it. _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board(a)redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating