2008/12/20 Clayton
There's some feeling been shown by Novell staff, that too few ppl are testing Beta's and RC's.
Well, in my case I won't test on my hardware (aka bare metal install) because I need a functioning system, and I can't take my computer down for daily restarts to test the each build of the next release (it's a fileserver, webserver etc.). As a compromise I install as many builds as I can into a VM (mainly VirtualBox) and tinker there. Almost always by the time I run into a bug it's already been reported.
The disadvantage of doing all my testing in a VM is that a lot of the quirks of installing on the actual hardware will never show up.
My presumption was, that the applications have been reasonably tested at some point, by builds on a stable system. So with the release, I'm trying to tax the installer, and see how the kernel does on older hardware, you know those boxes ppl have that keep going and going, but aren't what developers are going to have on their desk or lap tops. Yes, it's why I'm going to be planning my boxes with spare partitions (for /boot & /), with most data held in LVM, that doesn't need any of it's filesystems mounted (intially by installer anyway). I've tried to test on quirky hardware, but issues I worked round with 10.3 (mostly libata/pata_* stuff), still need to be worked round. Those are mostly things that have affected other installations, when I search Bugzilla, I didn't have to open a new bug, but do a "me to" and run tests. It might be more effective to test vanilla kernel, and particularly when they're in -rc mode, complain if there's regressions.
I don't know the solution... continuous updating the head as Gentoo does? That approach has some major problems too.
Debian are probably the best example. The key commitment they make is that you can upgrade, from an up to date "stable" release, to the next via the distupgrade. Ubuntu claim that, but I've seen comment in the forum that there's issues, at least with Kubuntu, which may be expected given it's secondary status to GNOME. What problems do you see in the rolling update approach? With online update and OBS we seem to have progressed considerably in that direction. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org