Test releases - be careful out there

The announcement for the second Fedora Core 2 test release went out right on schedule. We hope to have a review of this release done in the near future. In the mean time, it's worth noting that the interest in this release appears to be relatively high, and that some testers are encountering significant difficulties with this release.

Some of the problems being encountered are not surprising to anybody. FC2t2 is the first test release which has SELinux enabled. The incorporation of SELinux into a multipurpose distribution like Fedora is simply guaranteed to generate a fair number of surprises. Working with SELinux in the test release is, in fact, likely to be relatively obnoxious; it is, after all, a fundamentally different security model. There will be a lot of glitches to shake out. Anybody who is even thinking about going near Fedora SELinux in the near future should have a good look at the FC2 SELinux FAQ first. Then read it a second time.

Adding SELinux is certain to be disruptive. Some users will no doubt be unhappy about the fact that they are, in some sense, helping Red Hat debug this feature so that it can be incorporated (with less pain) into the Enterprise Linux products. Bringing in SELinux is an important thing to do, however; we have to improve the security of our systems, and SELinux has the potential to help in the containment of compromises. The Fedora Project is doing us all a favor by blazing this particular trail.

The FC2t2 installation disk has also surprised a number of testers by refusing to boot on their systems. The workaround is fairly straightforward: boot from an earlier Fedora disk, then swap CDs at the boot prompt. But this failure, combined with some other difficulties, has led some potential testers to criticize Red Hat in a loud and public way. The claim is that insufficient quality control on Red Hat's part led to them wasting a bunch of time and bandwidth downloading a release that they cannot even install, much less test.

What may be happening here is that Fedora is bringing in some new users who are unaccustomed to testing bleeding-edge software. New participants in the development process are more than welcome, but they do need to realize that they are exactly that: participants in the development process. No product as complicated as a Linux distribution is going to reach a steady state without a great many testers giving it a try and shaking out the bugs; this is true even of distribution releases which do not include little novelties like the 2.6 kernel and SELinux. If you install (or attempt to install) a test release, you have to be prepared for surprises. When a surprise finds you, it's time to pick up the pieces and help the developers figure out what's going on. But it helps nobody if testers criticize those developers when the test release they have provided (for free) has problems.

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