-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2008-12-24 at 14:43 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
Le mercredi 24 décembre 2008, à 14:27 +0100, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
What problems? Let me see, I'll list mine:
- You need a good Internet connection. Factory changes so fast that I have serious difficulties doing a "zypper dup", because it changes before I have time to download.
That's because of the huge amount of stuff you need to download, while not everything has changed. This is hard to solve, but we can try to solve it.
This round I had to concentrate on installing the minimum set of packages I can live with. Instead of having both kde and gnome, I installed only gnome. Even so, a "dup" meant about 1 gigabyte. If, when the dup succeeded, I saw I needed a certain extra package, installing it was impossible, as the repo had runaway again. What I think is needed, is the repo not changing for a day or more. If you need to push changes, do so to another repo. I don't know how to do this: perhaps a repo that changes fast, and another that has snapshots taken on certain known days, so that we have some time to install and test.
- You need a separate machine so not to disrupt your work. Or you need a separate partition (and remember that the number of partitions is now more limited than they were). There is some danger of what you install in factory partition breaking things in your main partition.
Indeed, I wouldn't recommend to people to use Factory on their work machine (unless you work on openSUSE). But people can still do this on some other machine, or in a virtual machine, or as you mention, on a separate partition. We won't get as many users as for a stable release, but that should still be enough.
The problem is, every hurdle adds on, so there remain fewer testers that survive. I mentioned partitions. I know some folks that have to repartition their machines because they are over the limit - and this means they will scrap the factory partition.
- You can end with broken hardware (Intel network!)
True. How often does this happen, though?
I know. But it sends chills down my spine, even though my network card is not Intel. Some other hardware may break one year and I'd be affected.
- You may be affected by bugs that for you are "blockers" but not for others. I was. I have been a month without being able to run factory at all, because it crashed (reiser and beagle problem reborn!). I had things I wanted to test and have been unable to. Not even now.
That's the hard thing. I don't have a magic solution here :/
None has. The point is perhaps that this testing round has been too fast, too short.
- Testers have to be experienced, so that they can solve some problems on their own.
Is this really an issue? (less testers, but that's still fine since we don't expect to have everybody running Factory)
Well, it is an issue if you want more testers. Just an idea: what about providing a ready made vmware image, ready for testers to test applications?
- Some testers wait till the RC phase before testing. I myself wait till beta, I don't consider myself hardy enough to test earlier.
Chicken and egg problem :-) If you don't get testers earlier, you don't get stability earlier.
I know. But not having a dedicated machine, I feel that testing earlier is too risky for me.
- They have to be able to read and write English. Yes, there are testers who don't.
Nod. This would limit the number of testers, but it doesn't mean we can't get more testing.
As I said, it is one stone more in the road. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAklSg8gACgkQtTMYHG2NR9XBFQCbBsxOOw+G+WQPbpzKCi/n7tXf QqoAnAlKleL+UkZLaiKdFJHCQpMY7ydd =N2EO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----