Update: This proposal has now been put into action.
Hi everyone, this is a proposed change for Fedora Release Criteria. It is related to a wide set of changes that Fedora Quality team need to perform this cycle, which are summarized here, so please feel free to read that for more background information and general overview, thanks.
Proposal: No longer consider optical media boot as release-blocking on bare metal machines, for any install medium.
You can see the current release criterion here, and (expand the footnotes sections) it reads:
All release-blocking images must boot in their supported configurations.
Release-blocking live and dedicated installer images must boot when written to optical media of an appropriate size (if applicable) and when written to a USB stick with any of the officially supported methods.
According to FESCO decision, QA team is not responsible for physical optical media testing. However, if any bug is found, it’ll be considered to be a blocker.
As you can see, the Quality team wasn’t required to test optical media since 2020, but any issue found could still be a blocker. We didn’t like this solution very much (blocking on something that we don’t test), but testing optical boot was simply too time-consuming and already niche. Now, 5 years later, we think it’s finally time to drop the whole criterion. The importance of optical boot is long gone, and we believe it’s time to remove it from the “critical feature list” called release criteria. It will not save us much time (I don’t remember any high-profile optical boot issue over the last few years), but it will simplify our test matrices a bit (making them easier to read), it will resolve the dichotomy between release-blocking status and Quality coverage, and it will allow us to get rid of the DVD drive and media we still have ready (but probably no longer work anyway) if a problem was found.
Important note: If you’re not very familiar with the release criteria process, please read this. Removing a release criterion doesn’t mean removing the feature. Optical media will still work even after this change. The difference is that if a problem is found, it will not be considered critical enough to block the release of the next upcoming Fedora. Instead, it will be resolved as any other standard bug.
Virtualization note: As stated in the discussion below, some part of the optical boot stack will still be tested (and be release-blocking) in the form of virtualization testing. Most virtualization tools still rely on booting ISO images in the form of virtual optical media, and as long as they do, this will be included in release validation. The proposal above applies to bare metal machines only.
