Fedora pre-releases

Posted Sep 10, 2011 0:32 UTC (Sat) by j1mc (subscriber, #56848)
In reply to: Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu? by AlexHudson
Parent article: Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Yeah, I keep wanting to try Fedora pre-releases to better test and document GNOME stuff, but when a post-alpha update renders my system unbootable (a recent update dropped me to a grub prompt with no easily-researchable remedy), I'm not going to spend several more hours fixing my computer just so I can contribute.

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.

Fedora pre-releases

Posted Sep 11, 2011 23:00 UTC (Sun) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

Ubuntu developers are mostly using the development release from (depending on their bravery and experience) somewhere between pre-alpha-1 and alpha-3 or so onward. Canonical staff in general are normally told to upgrade at beta unless they have a very good reason not to. From beta onwards, it's not unheard of for serious breaks-entire-world type bugs to invoke our internal crisis procedure (phone up management chain until you get hold of somebody, relevant experts full-time on the problem, must pass state to somebody else before leaving work, etc.); I've been on the hook for that a couple of times myself. There are definitely incentives to try to keep things working. The general attitude here is probably OK but we could execute it better and more broadly.

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.