No More Alphas
Summary
Fedora will no longer produce Alpha releases.
Owner
- Name: Dennis Gilmore, Adam Williamson
- Email: dennis@ausil.us, awilliam@redhat.com
- Release notes owner:
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 27
- Last updated: 2017-02-16
- Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Detailed Description
By adding CI and gating on Rawhide we will enable rawhide to be more stable and generally useful to people as a daily driver. As a result rawhide should always be at alpha quality, by keeping Rawhide always at Alpha quality we will be no longer need to do Alpha releases.
Benefit to Fedora
By keeping rawhide always at Alpha quality or better we provide a compelling environment for people to have the latest and greatest bits. Developers and tech enthusiasts would want to be running rawhide. Which will result in it getting bug fixes quicker and resulting in an overall better development release. We can drop Alpha releases as we will always be at Alpha quality, by no longer doing Alpha we gain an extra 4 weeks in the schedule which will let us do more. We may need to add a Change testing checkpoint to ensure that new Changes are progressing and are testable, without the need of freezing and branching. The cost of the checkpoint milestone will be much less than the current cost of doing an Alpha release is. We will able to branch 4 weeks later in the schedule than we had previously.
Scope
- Proposal owners: rearrange the koji tag and target structure, have the testing in place, setup processes to move builds in koji when they pass testing
- Other developers: Pay attention to new notifications and act when necessary
- Release engineering: #6621
- List of deliverables: This change removes a milestone and all associated deliverables
- Policies and guidelines: As there is no more Alpha we will need to update the guidelines to have changes be completed for Beta. We will likely want to add a new checkpoint for change impelemtation that currently needs to be checked at Alpha
- Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
Upgrade/compatibility impact
There will be no change to existing systems.
How To Test
See that there is no Alpha release any longer
User Experience
Rawhide will be more stable and be suitable for use on a daily basis by all developers and tech enthusiasts.
Dependencies
QA to have tests to detect when a new build breaks dependencies. releng to make changes to tagging in koji a tool to move builds from -pending into rawhide when it passes its tests notifications on test failures and delays in getting packages into rawhide
Contingency Plan
- Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
- Contingency deadline: a month before alpha would have occurred
- Blocks release? No
- Blocks product? None
Reinstate Alpha milestone and release. we will know if we are on target a few weeks before when Alpha would have been.
Documentation
Dennis' Moving everyone to rawhide talk at DevConf Ralph's Factory 2.0 Talk at DevConf