Hi, folks!

So, Beta RC4 is out there and being tested (thanks for all the testing so far). There is an RC5 coming too: here's why.

We haven't found any blockers in RC4 yet, but we did find several not- quite-blockers that seemed bad. First of all, the Silverblue (formerly known as Atomic Workstation) installer image build failed due to a network blip, so RC4 does not have that image. If we ship RC4 as the Beta, we wouldn't have a Silverblue installer for the Beta at all (unless we did some ugly hack to stuff some other image in), and that seems bad - the image isn't release-blocking, but it is a major area of development and we really ought to include it in Beta.

Beyond that, we happened to run into and find fixes for quite a slew of bugs in gnome-shell, plus a couple in gtk+ and mesa that are quite visible too. Here's a list of all the bugs in question:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1630134 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/574 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/539 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/merge_requests/227 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/523 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1631068 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1628462

So nirik, mboddu and I agreed it'd be reasonable to run a Beta RC5 to give us at least the option of shipping a compose with the Silverblue image and fixes for all those bugs, if everything goes well. As there aren't any outright blockers in it, Beta RC4 is still a candidate for release too.

Beta RC5 should complete in ten hours or so. There should be no difference between Beta RC4 and Beta RC5 outside of GNOME and the mesa fix, so most RC4 tests should be valid for RC5 too.

So, please continue testing RC4. Once RC5 arrives, go ahead and test that too, prioritizing smoke tests, tests of GNOME, and any Basic / Beta tests not yet run against RC4. It is not a high priority to run tests on RC5 that have already been run on RC4, unless they're basic smoke tests or GNOME tests.

Thanks a lot, everyone!