Israwhidebroken.com Proposal

Overview

Provide a single, well-known location with information about whether or not Rawhide is broken, and a link to the last known-good Rawhide tree.

Problem Space

Sometimes Rawhide is broken. Brokenness typically comes in one of these types:

• Installer
  • Installer images missing
  • Installer doesn't work
• Repo
  • Metadata is missing
  • Package/file conflicts
  • Dependency problems
• Functional
  • Major bugs with packages in the "Critical Path" (see Critical Path Packages Proposal)

When Rawhide is broken it's much harder for people to become Rawhide testers, harder for developers to get fixes into the hands of testers, and other such badness.

Proposed Solution

First, we should create test cases for each of the types of breakage described previously. These should be automated or scripted when possible.

These tests should be run regularly (daily if possible) by QA team members and other interested parties. The results should be submitted and displayed prominently on a public website. Kyle McMartin registered israwhidebroken.com for this purpose.

Second: currently we keep copies of several weeks' worth of daily Rawhide trees in the Koji build system. When a tree is deemed good (i.e. when it passes all the tests) someone from QA should file a ticket with rel-eng to create a "known-good" symlink for that rawhide tree. This link should be public and well-known. Someone suggested the name "chewtoy" for this known-good Rawhide.

Discussion Points

See also these previously-discussed requirements for a "good" Rawhide: JohnPoelstra/ImproveRawhideF10#Defining_GOOD

Comments?

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