Definitely not new; definitely always been an awful idea

Posted Jul 16, 2012 21:25 UTC (Mon) by louie (guest, #3285)
In reply to: This isn't new by dwmw2
Parent article: Left by Rawhide

Also, users have always been told that "if it breaks in Rawhide you get to keep both pieces"; that isn't new either. And it's always been variable — some developers really don't care about their packages in Rawhide until a new release is imminent, while others do try to keep it working.

While it is true that this has always been the policy, it has also always been an awful policy, pretty much guaranteeing that only the clinically insane, like our beloved editor ;), perform QA on Rawhide.

Perhaps more importantly, it also has the awful side-effect of supporting waterfall-y (read: bad) developer habits. All developers should always be encouraged, by hook and by crook, to keep HEAD buildable and runnable. Explicitly telling users "HEAD will frequently not be runnable" implicitly tells developers that it is perfectly fine to leave HEAD in a non-runnable state. That kind of attitude leads to worse software.

[Not that you don't sometimes need to break HEAD; but it should be something done only when the other options are very bad, and ideally after much testing on a branch. Same should apply to Rawhide.]