On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 14:43 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
We're not really talking about 'normal users' running Rawhide, anyway. We're talking about people who are interested in helping improve release quality and testing bleeding-edge code, who can at least work a text editor from a console, and have the flexibility to understand that Rawhide stuff *will* break occasionally and they'll have to work around it.
I think people need to be able to significantly more than use a text editor. You need to be able to rescue your system when booting fails. I think you pretty much need to be an amateur sysadm.
No, you don't. It's a test system. You blow it away and re-install, if you don't know how to fix it.
Usually, also, if the problem is one that affects more than a few people, someone will post a note about what's wrong and how to fix it to the discussion list. Or, they would, if enough people ran Rawhide. :)
I'm basing this on experience. Lots of people run Mandriva's development branch. Some of them, frankly, I wouldn't have trusted to edit a text file *at all*. But they seemed to manage to get along. They didn't go away and stop asking dumb questions, anyway. =)
I think going for the vast majority of Packagers might be overly optimistic. Besides needing sysadm skills, you also need good bandwith.
That's a fair point, yeah. But still, I don't think most packagers with decent bandwidth run Rawhide.