On 02/22/2018 09:35 PM, Richard Brown wrote:
Rawhide and Sid are not really tested before releasing packages to users. By design and intent they can very often by broken.
That's a bit dishonest. We don't have openQA in Debian, that's correct. But we regularly rebuild the whole Debian archive on the AWS cloud for the reproducible builds project and also test packages for their installability and upgradeability using "piuparts". There is also a project that regularly rebuilds the archive using LLVM and one project that constantly re-bootstraps Debian from source (rebootstrap). Debian is also usually one of the main players when it comes fixing bugs during gcc and similar transitions. If you are checking the various upstream projects, you see that lots of fixes for bugs, especially for non-x86 stuff, comes from Debian folk. Don't forget that Debian has lots of people who are directly working for upstream projects like Mozilla, Valve, Google, Intel, ARM, IBM and Loongson (the MIPS guys). My private laptop runs Debian unstable and my company laptop runs openSUSE Tumbleweed. I dist-upgrade both laptops daily and to be honest, in the past 6 months, it was the openSUSE laptop that ran into issues that made the machine unusable. One was a change in one of the network packages which broke DHCP (I think it was wicked) and one was the recent Mesa(?) bug which broke KDE on Tumbleweed. I didn't have any such issues on my Debian unstable installations. In fact, my unstable installations are usually quite old and I just carry them over from one computer to another but dist-upgrade them every day.
The design and intent of Tumbleweed is to never knowingly allow the shipping of anything broken. Tumbleweed only releases any new package once that cohesive build has been tested in openQA. That means we use OBS to build/rebuild all of the packages and media consistently as a result of any recent changes in the distribution, and validate the basic functionality covered by openQA.
Debian is most likely going to adapt openQA for Debian Installer soon. Adam gave a good talk during DebConf17 about it and he convinced the Debian Installer team to adopt it :-).
As openQA does user-orientated functionality testing (actuall automates what a user will do, and looks for what they will see/read), we can KNOW that Tumbleweed can always be installed, X/Wayland always works, as do our tested desktop environments and popular applications, server workloads, etc.
I agree. OpenQA is awesome. But it cannot catch all issues as we've seen in the past 6 months. For all intents and purpose, Tumbleweed remains a rolling release distribution and anyone who doesn't know how to fix the occasional hickups themselves or with the help of the community (that includes knowing how to properly report bugs or ask on mailing lists), shouldn't be running Tumbleweed in the first place.
That's what elevates Tumbleweed to miles above Rawhide and Sid at this time. (Though obviously, given Fedora are starting to test Rawhide and hold back it's releases based on their own openQA testing, I guess I'm going to have to stop saying that one day)
Rawhide isn't really intended for normal users though. Rawhide is primarily targeting Fedora's distribution developers. Unless you want to work on Fedora, you should not be using Rawhide at all. Normal Fedora releases are usually already bleeding-edge enough, there is no need to switch to Rawhide. FWIW, Rawhide is so extremely bleeding edge that half of the packages are either pre-release or git snapshot versions. So there isn't really any other distribution that is more bleeding edge than Fedora (not even Arch) but it's basically a minefield. So putting Rawhide into this comparison is flawed anyway. From what I know, RedHat does lots of integration testing in Fedora though. I learned that recently while fixing Firefox on big endian targets. Adrian -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org