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Revision as of 03:56, 16 February 2017 by Ausil (talk | contribs) (→‎Scope)


No More Alphas

Summary

Fedora will no longer produce Alpha releases.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 27
  • Last updated: 2017-02-16
  • Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

By gating Rawhide compose publication on automated test results we will ensure Rawhide will always be at Alpha quality. This will make it more generally useful to people as a daily driver and development platform, and mean we no longer need to go through the process of building, testing and shipping Alpha releases.

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, and potentially offers more flexibility for the Change development and branching parts of the release cycle. Preventing broken changes from reaching the official Rawhide repository at all 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 in 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
  • Policies and guidelines: As there is no more Alpha we will need to update the guidelines to have changes be completed for Beta. We will likely want to add a new checkpoint for change implementation that currently needs to be checked at 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: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
  • Contingency deadline: a month before alpha would have occurred
  • Blocks release? No
  • Blocks product? None

Reinstate Alpha milestone and release. we will know if we are on target a few weeks before when Alpha would have been.

Documentation

Release Notes