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.