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
Detailed Description
By gating Rawhide builds from landing in the compose and gating the publication of composes on automated test results, we will ensure Rawhide will always be at Alpha quality. This gating will make it more generally useful to people as a daily driver and development platform, and means we no longer need to go through the process of building, testing and shipping Alpha releases. The initial testing will be ensuring that a package is can be installed and that it does not break existing package installations. Over time, we can enable extra testing to gate the build going into rawhide. Builds will land in the buildroot immediately after the build has completed in order to be built against, and before they make it to the compose. We will run the gating testing only to gate builds to the compose and not in order to make the buildroot.
Benefit to Fedora
A Rawhide that is always at least Alpha quality is a more compelling product and may attract more target users (developers) to Fedora. Removing the process overhead of Alpha releases from the cycle frees up release engineering, quality engineering, development and project management resources for other work. It potentially offers more flexibility for the Change development and branching parts of the release cycle. Preventing broken changes from reaching the official Rawhide repository means we are not stuck with fundamentally problematic changes, (bar doing epoch bumps and rebuilds of dependent packages) but can more easily revert them.
Scope
- Proposal owners: rearrange the koji tag and target structure, have the testing in place, setup processes to move builds into koji when they meet gating criteria. The changes would start to be implemented in rawhide shortly after branching Fedora 26
- 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 indicate changes are to be completed for Beta. We will likely want to add a new checkpoint for change implementation that was followed for 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: Reinstate Alpha milestone and release. We will know if we are on target a few weeks before as when Alpha would have been.
- Contingency deadline: a month before alpha would have occurred (that would have been August 22nd, so, July 22nd is this deadline)
- Blocks release? No
- Blocks product? None