Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Posted Sep 9, 2011 19:00 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)In reply to: Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu? by AlexHudson
Parent article: Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Posted Sep 9, 2011 19:41 UTC (Fri)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (27 responses)
F15 lost parallel printer support almost completely it seems, and network printing is not much better: the Gnome system settings cappet for it simply does not work, and s-c-p works insofar as I can configure the printer and see toner levels (useful!) but not yet print.
I can name tonnes of other issues, like the fact pino made it into the default install despite not working in any obvious way, even though this was known before release. Of course, there are bugs in all software: what it comes down to, though, is "Are there sufficient numbers of bugs that they cut across most users' experience?" In the case of Fedora, that's almost certainly true: even if the "Gold" tested release works; hundreds of updates are released within a couple of days which will almost certainly break something crucial.
I use Fedora on all my machines, I try to help develop it. But it's busted beyond fixing right now, and I'd never let a "normal user" anywhere near it for any extended period of time.
Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:14 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (21 responses)
I've seen someone report that a 3rd party gtk theme they installed ended up breaking gtk based apps when trying to print. Uninstalling the gtk theme fixed the issue. Maybe you have something like that on your syetem?
I don't have a parallel printer anymore so I can't provide any feedback on that.
As for F16...well...its pre-release still...meh.
-jef
Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:57 UTC (Fri)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (20 responses)
I'd love to be able to tell you why my setup simply doesn't work and yours does (gnome capplet notwithstanding; I assume that doesn't work for anyone, but maybe there is a small group for whom it's awesome). I've no idea, and I've looked hard. I have a colord warning in CUPS but the printer is mono, maybe there's an issue there - but it's all chatting over dbus and I have no idea how to turn that off or whatever. I'll just keep waiting until the maintainer gives me some clue in the bug I opened months ago.
The "As for F16" attitude is exactly why Fedora doesn't get tested properly - because no-one gives a flying monkey about the prerelease. I know plenty of Fedora packagers who simply do not use it, because it's broken crap. So what happens is that people don't bother even trying it until alpha or beta at best.
I'm one of the few who persists in using F16 as a day-to-day system, because you cannot test stuff properly without running it more or less full time. And I get bitten on the ass regularly for my trouble. And let's be honest, there's no consensus within the project that *releases* are even suitable for anyone outside of hobbyist hackers anyway.
To finish this on a positive note: AdamW is probably one of the best value hires Red Hat has made in recent years, and the QA and test day stuff keeps getting better in a large part (it seems to me) due to him. It's not like progress isn't being made; it's just that stuff keeps being broken.
Posted Sep 9, 2011 23:33 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (17 responses)
I expect breakage to happen somewhere in the chosen distribution release model. I also understand that "time-release" models versus "when its ready" models will absolutely positively allow more breakages through into the distribution release due to the nature of complexity of the integration process and the existence of finite resources. We can beat on that reality with better tooling and better resource management, but I take it as a true fact that there are unsolvable conflicts of interest in aggressive time based releases and the needs of integration testing.
Holding up Debian as the gold standard that it is, they have experimental and unstable to do integration work in a more granular fashion...but they also "release" at a much longer timescale. They live with the same conflicts they have chosen a different point of the curve to live on.
For Fedora specifically I expect most (but not all breakage) to happen in the pre-release tree. I'm not going to get overtly upset when my pre-release F16 install falls over and dies due to an pre-release update mistake. Should I be mad when it happens? Should I spit bullets and rage at the sky? How does that help?
I also think your conjecture as to why few people are running pre-release is probably overly simplistic. The chosen release cycle and the lifetime cycle put additional constraints on package maintainers. But let's cycle back to Debian. Do you know what percentage of Debian users/maintainers run Experimental or Unstable on a day-to-day basis?
-jef
Posted Sep 10, 2011 2:07 UTC (Sat)
by imgx64 (guest, #78590)
[Link] (8 responses)
I don't have any statistics, but my guess is that mostly everyone not running a server is running Unstable. Experimental is rarely used as a whole, but people often install individual packages from Experimental in an Unstable system.
Posted Sep 10, 2011 9:43 UTC (Sat)
by bobbytables (guest, #65908)
[Link] (1 responses)
I'm running stable - although I have some very few key packages (non-free firmware, virtualbox and wireless hacking tools) from stable-backports, testing and unstable.
I'm sure there are plenty people more as me. The simple fact that stable-backports exist can attest this, not to mention the bugs which are filed against desktop software by people who use stable. All bug reports done through the reportbug tool have a "apt prefers" section which tells which release they are using.
Posted Sep 10, 2011 20:32 UTC (Sat)
by przemoc (guest, #67594)
[Link]
Well, not exactly same, because over time not only key packages have been upgraded in my box (like tmux from backports, nvidia-* from testing/wheezy), but even less important ones. OTOH due to bumped versions of dependencies in testing+ (like in case of okular, it needed though lowering KDE4 ver requirement and removing some unsupported &jovie; in index.docbook) or lack of maintainership (like in case of pan), you're sometimes enforced to do your own builds. I also use external repos (for virtualbox or google-chrome).
I don't like adding repos of testing+ in stable explicitly, so I've crafted handy oneliner for getting all packages built from given source one.
PKG=git REL=wheezy ARCH=amd64 PKGHOST="http://packages.debian.org" MIRROR="ftp.pl.debian.org"; wget -q "$PKGHOST/source/$REL/$PKG" -O - | sed '/.*<dt><a href="/!d;s,,'"$PKGHOST"',;s,'"$REL"'/,&'"$ARCH"'/,;s,".*,/download,' | xargs wget -q -O - | sed '\,'"$MIRROR"',!d;s,[^"]*",,;s,".*,,' | xargs -n1 wget
It will surely break with next upgrade of debian sites look, but works for now (for me).
Posted Sep 10, 2011 16:44 UTC (Sat)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 10, 2011 16:45 UTC (Sat)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link]
Posted Sep 10, 2011 18:28 UTC (Sat)
by andrel (guest, #5166)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 10, 2011 19:56 UTC (Sat)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
Historically, in the first 6 months after a stable debian release goes gold, is there a noticeable drop off in the number of people using unstable? Or conversely as stable becomes more stale does the unstable users population grow?
Or to ask a more general question, is the unstable population in debian popcon a somewhat constant percentage or does it have statistically significant seasonal variations related to the debian stable release process?
If there was a way to estimate the usage of testing and experimental I'd appreciate any effort along those lines as well.
-jef
Posted Sep 10, 2011 23:01 UTC (Sat)
by andrel (guest, #5166)
[Link]
FTP/HTTP logs at one of the major download servers could also be used to answer your questions. But I don't have access to that.
Posted Sep 14, 2011 15:02 UTC (Wed)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
Now there is a compromise here: if nobody uses testing on their desktop then it will not get the exposure it needs to become a good stable release. But I am happy because I have two good releases for the desktop; and one (testing) is basically a rolling release.
Posted Sep 10, 2011 6:52 UTC (Sat)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (6 responses)
That simply isn't true: the nature of the release cycle makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. What makes the difference is people racing to a deadline to fit certain things in - there's no reason that the decision to release a package to a distribution for either cycles needs be different. Sure, Debian has a ~24 month cycle compared to a ~6 for Fedora. That's not the comparison. Debian Testing is pretty much continuous/rolling (bar freezes and stuff), and is generally both a. more up-to-date than the released Fedora and b. more stable (obviously neither of those things are totally quantitative). As for getting upset: I don't think it's right to get upset at other packagers for any reason, pretty much. But setting aside your prejudicial words: is this an ok situation? You might be happy with F16 breaking continually, seeing it as a cost of the integration work. I'm not. F16 breaking stops other people getting work done. It's like someone submitting code into the trunk of a repository that doesn't compile. Yes, accidents happen. No, it's not a good situation. This is plain and obvious to me. (BTW, comparing F16 with Debian Unstable is also clearly a false comparison. Unstable and Rawhide are more directly comparable; F16 is a release branch and more akin to Debian's testing - which large numbers of people use extremely happily).
Posted Sep 10, 2011 7:45 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 10, 2011 10:03 UTC (Sat)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (4 responses)
Fedora hasn't got to that point: the question isn't, how do we do it better? The question is vastly more fundamental than that: what is the end goal?
It's not clear to me that there's a broad consensus that Fedora is aimed at people beyond Fedora contributors and 'enthusiasts' (a code-word for 'people who know how to fix things when we break them').
Without coming to a consensus about whether or not Fedora should be useful to people who don't necessarily know how to fix everything, there's no point talking about "how to do it better".
Posted Sep 10, 2011 15:22 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 10, 2011 16:43 UTC (Sat)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (2 responses)
That aside, I disagree that this is an issue of man-power or participation, but even assuming that it is: why is it that enough people are not participating? I would venture that it's because the prerelease OS is just not generally usable, and that "testing" in this instance doesn't just mean using the stuff you usually would do and reporting the papercuts, it means "expect your system to break horribly". The canary in the coal mine form of testing.
Posted Sep 10, 2011 17:45 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (1 responses)
You are guessing that pre-release breakage is turning off people from testing and that might well be the case but going a little bit further, have you thought about why there is pre-release breakage and what can be done to break out of that cycle? There is always a shortage of resources in people in quality assurance for distributions with a short release cycle. For instance, AutoQA could prevent a number of breakages and they have been repeatedly asking for help in writing tests. Certainly a resource shortage there.
Posted Sep 15, 2011 15:35 UTC (Thu)
by mrshiny (guest, #4266)
[Link]
As a long time Fedora user myself, I constantly encounter problems (certain releases were worse than others, I'm running F14 and it's doing ok). I always worry when I sit down at my computer, 10 times in 8 days, and EACH TIME there are new updates to install. What is going to break this time? I know how to fix things but I'm not interested in trying something even more temperamental than the "stable" releases. And if the only solution to my problem is to become a fedora developer or QA person, then you're saying that Fedora is only for the people who make it.
Posted Sep 10, 2011 10:44 UTC (Sat)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link]
Perhaps the main difference between unstable and Fedora is that unstable is used to package new versions of upstream stable releases; packaging unreleased or development releases of upstream software is not the norm, and that's not what unstable is for. Occasionally beta releases prior to release are uploaded (e.g. postgresql 9.1 recently), but this is generally only done when it's known good (it was tested in experimental for several months). Experimental exists to allow testing and integration/staging of bleeding edge stuff without breaking unstable, and I think it does a fairly good job in that regard.
Regards,
Posted Sep 10, 2011 0:32 UTC (Sat)
by j1mc (subscriber, #56848)
[Link] (1 responses)
Say what you will about Ubuntu, but their pre-releases post-alpha 3 are serviceable. They boot. There might be crashes, but they are application crashes, not things that will keep you out of your system.
To me, it seems like a negative cycle of sorts. Fedora pre-releases break, so they don't get the testing they need, so they don't get the attention and fixes they need, either.
Posted Sep 11, 2011 23:00 UTC (Sun)
by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322)
[Link]
I guess the buzzword here is velocity: the better your development release works, the easier it is for people to work with it and land their own work based on it. While I don't agree with all of Scott's proposed solution, I generally agree with his problem statement and I think we can probably find common ground around things like using QA to gate the promotion of packages between channels. This certainly doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing discussion.
Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:24 UTC (Fri)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link]
Pre-release versions are a completely different issue. They have to meet a certain set of criteria... which is basically they should be installable enough to allow for testing and bug reporting. They aren't really supposed to be usable. Of course it would be nice if there were never any bugs and nothing to report.
Lots of updates? There sure are. I like that. I do agree with you, I don't really recommend Fedora to a newbie. I recommend it to computer / Linux literate person who has already been using Linux for a while. It is an innovator's distro... where you can get your hands on the latest and greatest stuff. While they would like it to be for everyone even the newbie, their development model / cycle does not lend itself to that really.
Fedora is totally awesome for people who want to give back / contribute, not just in software development but in documentation, bug reporting, testing, etc. It reminds me for the good old days when someone sent out an email asking if you were tired of your computer just working and wanted some adventure and excitement. :)
Posted Sep 10, 2011 3:57 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 10, 2011 7:20 UTC (Sat)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (1 responses)
However, I would note that it only got removed on the 10th May, which was the original Fedora 15 gold release date: so it was removed in time by virtue of the release being two weeks late. Arguably it would have blocked release, but it really should not have got to that point.
Posted Sep 10, 2011 7:43 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Sep 10, 2011 17:39 UTC (Sat)
by nirik (subscriber, #71)
[Link]
/boot was blown away? By what?
Printing works fine here in f15 (although network, not parallel).
I'd suggest for f16, 'yum groupinstall xfce-desktop' (or kde, lxde, whatever), so when you run into gnome issues you have something you can at least use and debug from.
f15 has been perfectly usable for my Girlfriend day to day (though we did run into a issue with ipw2200 module a while back).
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
We can estimate the percent of Debian users on Unstable from popularity contest. Out of 111870 reports 49936 (45%) were running Stable and 15655 (14%) were running Testing/Unstable. Contrast that with 33756 (30%) running Oldstable!
(Submission of data to popcon is voluntary, so obviously that's a source of bias. Still, it's the best data we've got.)
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
The graphs on the popularity contest homepage hint at the answers to some of your questions. Unless the raw time-series data is posted somewhere, I can't provide you with anything better.
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
A few years ago almost everyone used testing (not unstable) on their desktops, and stable on the servers. But the latest stable release was so good that people stuck to that; now it is more popular than testing. Perhaps if stable releases are delayed then people will again migrate to testing further down the road, but right now the hardware changes are not so significant that it seems necessary. Last I looked the popcon graphics told this exact story.
Testing and stable
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
"I also understand that "time-release" models versus "when its ready" models will absolutely positively allow more breakages through into the distribution"
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Running development distributions
Roger
Fedora pre-releases
Fedora pre-releases
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?
Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?