Long overdue again for another “This week in rawhide”, I realized that I haven’t been able to do them weekly for quite some time, so I’m changing the name to ‘notes from the trail’ to play on the rawhide/cattle drive metaphor.
There was a good bit of rawhide discussion at flock this year and some of the things discussed there have already come to pass: Namely, Adam Williamson has setup openQA to run tests on branched (what will be Fedora 23) and rawhide. So, we now have some better idea when things are not working or didn’t generate images to test, etc. It’s sending emails to both fedora devel list and fedora test list.
I posted about the flock discussions in https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-August/213527.html but sadly it devolved into a discussion if we should rename rawhide or not and if so, to what. We still have not yet landed pungi4 for doing the rawhide composes, but hopefully that will happen before too long, and I am not sure the progress of adding taskotron checks to rawhide builds is.
Current rawhide should be back to ‘mostly signed’ packages. I have been signing things as time permits.
Finally, I would like to touch on something that has been mentioned in the various renaming rawhide to something else threads: perception. I cannot count the number of times I have seen someone appear in a end user support channel (#fedora, fedora-forum, users mailing list, etc) and say “Hi, I want to run rawhide, what do you think?” to which the answer is variants of “Oh no, rawhide breaks all the time” “It will blow up on you” or the like. On one side I can understand support folks saying that. They don’t want someone hitting bugs and getting upset and they don’t want someone who isn’t experienced in troubleshooting to get in over their head. On the other hand, its just not true anymore. I cannot recall the last serious breakage I ran into. The last bug I filed was about selinux preventing my root /var/spool/cron/root job from running (which was easy to work around and notice). When I last redid the rawhide wiki page I made sure to add a “Audience” to it: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide#Audience So, next time someone asks you if they should run rawhide, point them there and ask them if that describes them.