On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 18:18 +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 14:38 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
- 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:
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.
Create a RawhideBlocker tracker bug - add anything to it that breaks something on the dogfoodable list
Post details to fedora-devel-list of any new bug added to RawhideBlocker, cc-ing the package owners
Harass package owners, and encourage others to help, until the issue is resolved
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.
This all sounds very sensible. To be honest, my Grand Strategy is not to take on anything related to this project (making Rawhide more widely used) that requires me to poke the development team for a few weeks / months - i.e. until the people on the development list know I have some kind of clue what the hell I'm talking about (er, I hope I do :>). I don't think it would go down very well for me to just show up one day in the development group with my Grand Plans For Changing Everything. You have to wheedle your way in slowly. ;)
So I've been thinking of various things along those same lines - although I definitely like the way you've laid that out - but not planning to take them to the 'public formal proposal' stage for a while. If you feel you're in a position to make this happen, though - or anyone else is, and wants to - please do go for it and I will support you with all my meagre strength :)