New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Will Woods, the new test lead for the Fedora Project, has only been in his position a few weeks, but already he has a clear goal in mind. Whenever Fedora is mentioned on Slashdot, he notes, "There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again.""
(Log in to post comments)
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 19, 2006 22:32 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]
Well, but Fedora *is* a beta for RHEL. (Sorry Woody, but someone had to say it:-) Its just not *all* it is. One of the other things Fedora is is an open, stable platform for development on bleeding-edge versions of tools e.g. gcc, GTK+, and GNOME.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 0:36 UTC (Thu) by j0el (guest, #1764) [Link]
I think it is more like a "concept car" than a beta. Albeit one that is both affordable and driveable.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 3:13 UTC (Thu) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link]
... stable platform for development on bleeding-edge versions of tools e.g. gcc, GTK+, and GNOMEWhich by definition are often not that stable. That nitpick aside, new versions of Fedora get released a little too frequently for something that is officially "not beta for RHEL". Perhaps the releases should be based on considerable advances in functionality. As a corollary, the relatively small changes between FC5 and FC6-candidates might be better served as updates to FC5.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 4:43 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]
... stable platform for development on bleeding-edge versions of tools e.g. gcc, GTK+, and GNOMEWhich by definition are often not that stable. That nitpick aside, new versions of Fedora get released a little too frequently for something that is officially "not beta for RHEL". Perhaps the releases should be based on considerable advances in functionality. As a corollary, the relatively small changes between FC5 and FC6-candidates might be better served as updates to FC5.
Have you looked at Fedora development lately? The freeze for Fedora 6 test 2 slipped recently because of large changes. An almost full rebuild is afoot right now, because of gcc and binutils changes.
The whole idea of Fedora is bleeding edge, that is a bit hard to be if you don't have a short development cycle. But then again, Fedora is not everybody's ideal, and luckily there are plenty of distributions from which to choose.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 7:07 UTC (Thu) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]
I'll second that. I can see no way that FC6 could have been an upgrade for FC5, if for no other reason than FC5 hosts Xorg 7.0 and FC6 hosts 7.1. nVidia and ATI proprietary drivers work (mostly) with 7.0, but not yet with 7.1, so its pretty impossible to include 7.1 as a "simple" update to FC5.
Yeah, I know: proprietary drivers aren't exactly Fedora's problem. But satisfied customers are.
Also, FC6 is shooting for GNOME 2.16, which has some pretty big changes in itself.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 22:28 UTC (Thu) by thebluesgnr (guest, #37963) [Link]
<i> "... stable platform for development on bleeding-edge versions of tools e.g. gcc, GTK+, and GNOME"
Which by definition are often not that stable. </i>
Red Hat Linux has always been like that. Do you remember gcc 2.96?
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 2:50 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]
I'll reserve judgement until I see how fast bugzilla bug #196556 gets fixed.Bit me bad... it either gets fixed soon, or I'll be looking hard at Ubuntu if I'm going to have to reinstall.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 16:56 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
What's so special about bug #196556 or its handling? Is it because it's affecting you? Then maybe you should put some more efforts into it, like checking the bare 2.6.17 with Fedora configuration, finding the patch on the config option that triggers the bug, adding some printk() in the suspicious places etc?
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 19:37 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]
Put up or shut up? Is that what you're saying? Perhaps you should be reminded that your advice is worth exactly what I paid for it.
Anyway, my point, which you missed, is that if FC5 isn't beta for RHEL5, then why are the Fedora developers determined to release "errata" that are really nothing more than the latest untested code and wait for bug reports that will languish in Bugzilla for weeks? It's very clear that FC5 *is* the beta for RHEL5 and my "rather obvious" prediction is that RHEL5 won't be coming out anytime soon if it's going to ship with a 2.6.17 kernel.... unless they document the bug by declaring that RHEL5 won't support Promise FastTrack RAID (which I wouldn't put past Red Hat)!
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 20:10 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
A few points
Fedora Core 5 is not a beta for anything. Fedora Core 6 is the basis for RHEL 5 and the current development tree of Fedora is already based on 2.6.18 kernel.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 7:58 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
I never used FC1.
FC2 had no driver disk support so it was awful.
The major thing issue FC3 was that the version of GRUB used in the 64 bit installer was badly screwed up so you often ended up with a blinking cursor. We had to do a respin for that. Also the 64 bit version of FC3 had this bug where if your partition had a '+' next to the blocks column in `fdisk -l` then the install would fail. So you had to manually go in and take a sector from one partition and add it to the other partition. I was happy when FC4 was released and I didn't have to do that. :)
FC4 was great. I respun it for a newer kernel and xorg because it didn't work on some quad CPU systems by default. No big deal.
I hate to be a downer, but FC5 was very depressing for me. There is no driver disk support again. That last minute kernel bug meant that you couldn't load non-GPL modules. Sometimes the install hangs if you use the "text" parameter and unfortunately I really need that to work now. Floppy disks and cdroms don't get added to /etc/fstab... etc.
I guess what would really make me happy if Fedora would work with the Fedora Unity guys. The kernel bug would not even be a big deal if I could just wait 1 month and get a fixed ISO. Basically bugs are OK if I don't have to wait 6 months for the fix.
Or here's the thing, I would hunt down why the text installs hang but then if I fixed that, I'd have to create a fixed RPM and then I'd have to do a full respin and then the respin would have to go through a full QC. Fixing the hang is not a problem but all that other stuff is.
If I could fix the hang, and send a patch to Redhat and get respun ISOs a month later then it would be worth it. For now, on systems where the graphical install doesn't work, I'm just going to stay with FC4.
I really think it was the long release cycle on FC5 that hurt the quality. If you look at Firefox, those guys have nightly builds so that bugs get caught early. The code base gets real world testing.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to use Fedora Unity 1 and by the time it was released I already had my own respin so I didn't try debug it. But for the long term, I really believe in it. Creating a respin is not easy or documented. Redhat has QC scripts to help catch problems. If they could throw some engineering help at the Unity guys that would really be so great.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 20, 2006 20:45 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
The testing framework needs to be accessible for those who are to the extend currently possible working with the developers already like, Fedora Unity contributors to take advantage of them. Thats part of the roadmap
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraTesting
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 21, 2006 0:49 UTC (Fri) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
I know the testing framework is available...
Here's what I would like, instead of adding driver disk support to the next release of Fedora, it could be added to Fedora Unity. Redhat employees would work with the Fedora Unity guys to make that happen. It would be a first class citizen. Redhat employees would spend some engineering time on it.
That's what I would really like.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 21, 2006 6:08 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I am not sure how driver disk support related to testing. Fedora Unity doesnt add anything beyond a respin that includes all of the formal updates and using the testing framework the community can share the work to make sure that it is well integrated.
Red Hat does not need to be involved in everything to make them "first class citizens".
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 21, 2006 17:10 UTC (Fri) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
>>I am not sure how driver disk support related to testing.
Driver disks support are just an example of things should have been tested, but weren't, so a bug was introduced. I gave other examples and I have more that I didn't give.
When bugs get missed in testing the perception is that (correct me if this is wrong) it won't get fixed until the next release. If there was an effort to fix the bugs and get the fixes to users quickly instead of waiting for six months I could use FC5. Fedora Unity could be way to do this and also it is a good tool for real world testing.
I have support requests to deal with right? The most common thing is that people can't reinstall their system. If I could tell them, Fedora Unity 3 will install on your system that would help me a lot.
New Fedora test lead begins work (NewsForge)
Posted Jul 22, 2006 11:05 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Innumerous bugs are fixed within the updates so the perception if it exists is completely wrong. What doesnt get fixed after a release is made is bugs in the installer (Anaconda) itself.
If you use a Fedora Unity respin, you would get all the updates included within the release itself so that potentially saves you post installation work. When we make the testing framework available externally, the unity team would be able to use that and make sure they dont introduce any regressions compared to the original releases.