oS Testing Core Team,
Since it looks like an IRC meeting may be a little while away, perhaps
we can deal with more things on the mailing list before we lose too
much momentum. I think the one of most important things we can do is
decide what we want to test against and when we want to move on from a
given release. This then gives all the team members a rough schedule
to follow, and it also lets the dev team know what to expect from us -
at least as far as testing the distro on real hardware goes.
A quick and dirty general roadmap of a release looks like this:
1. Check-in new updated packages
2. Decide what new features will be targeted at the release
3. Develop new features
4. Progressively freeze elements [Milestone 5 & 6]
5. Final Round of Testing [Release Candidates]
6. Post-release critical bug-fixing [Gold Master]
The points we can test are:
1. Factory, as components offered on top of a stable release (ex:KDE:Factory)
2. Factory, as a complete rolling distribution testing updates as they come
3. Factory, taking regular builds of our own choosing (ex: Every
Thursday's build)
4. Official Snapshots, such as Milestones/RCs/GM
IMHO, I think the oS TCT should also test the final release. Since
the team was formed pretty late in the roadmap, we should run the
final release for at least 2-4 weeks to help knock out bugs that
squeaked through. This should be done for 11.2 at least.
Looking ahead to 11.3, things are pretty wide open. Judging from some
of the changes in Factory and comments online, I believe that openSUSE
developers would really appreciate if more people ran Factory.
However, there may be a reduction in our effectiveness if we end up
fighting against obvious but big bugs (bad kernel builds,
uninstallable images, etc.). Ideally we would thoroughly test both
Factory as a distribution and Milestones, but that's probably not
feasible team-wide.
My first instinct is to test crap out of all the snapshots as that
will also provide the simplest scheduling mechanism - We just test a
given snapshot until the next one comes out...thus we test a final
release until the devs deliver Milestone 0 of the next version. We
can also leverage that time between GM and Milestone 0 to review the
last run and adjust our procedures accordingly.
However, we should decide as a team what to focus on - even if it
means splitting the team down the into a Snapshot Team and a Rolling
Release Team.
Refilwe
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