From Fedora Project Wiki


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

By keeping rawhide always at Alpha quality or better we provide a compelling environment for people to have the latest and greatest bits. Developers and tech enthusiasts would want to be running rawhide. Which will result in it getting bug fixes quicker and resulting in an overall better development release. We can drop Alpha releases as we will always be at Alpha quality, by no longer doing Alpha we gain an extra 4 weeks in the schedule which will let us do more. We may need to add a Change testing checkpoint to ensure that new Changes are progressing and are testable, without the need of freezing and branching. The cost of the checkpoint milestone will be much less than the current cost of doing an Alpha release is. We will able to branch 4 weeks later in the schedule than we had previously.

Scope

  • Proposal owners: rearrange the koji tag and target structure, have the testing in place, setup processes to move builds in koji when they pass testing
  • 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 impelemtation 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