Proposal for a Fedora Workstation Beta Version

Project Discussion
,
1

Hello Fedora Community,

What I am going to suggest is something what might be useful for the wider audience who wish to have a benefit of recent software versions while not putting their system at risk of Rawhide. This idea is to add in between Rawhide and the stable releases a Fedora Workstation Beta.

What experiences might this Fedora Workstation Beta provide?

Updates less frequent than rawhide, to prevent the risks associated with untested packages.

Targeted at relatively stable environments but provides access to newer software versions (e.g. GNOME) and not entirely bleeding edge(sorta).

Not just some weeks or few months before stable versions, but a continous alternative, 365 days a year for those who want to use the most “bleeding-edge” access in a more solid way.

I think that could get an audience inside of people who are afraid to use Rawhide because well it’s not very stable.

I would love to know what you think, and whether something like this might be feasible. Thank you for all the amazing work you do for Fedora!

2

From Proposed Common Issues to Project Discussion

3

Added quality-team, workstation-wg

4

basically this is more as a rolling release since it is based on rawhide, but more tested and stable packages as beta packages no version upgrades so rolling could be weekly update cycle too

5

who are you expecting to do the testing and stabilization?

4 Likes
6

Well, this seems to me like “taking a canon to go duck hunting”, i.e. doing a lot to achieve a little. Why?

Currently, Fedora runs in release cycles twice a year with Beta being branched some two months ahead of the Beta release with a following one month to reach the Final release. This means, that we have Fedora Beta going on for 6 months out of a year, ergo 50% of the time.

Fedora release validation uses criteria that are divided into three groups, such as Basic, Beta, and Final. The basic criteria should always be met, even in Rawhide, therefore we speak of Always Ready Rawhide which receives a fair amount of automated testing every single compose to avoid the most severe or most critical bugs. We rather succeed in this process so there are no terrible crashes in Rawhide most of the time, and there are people out there running Rawhide with no impact on their work.

For Beta release, we also need to spend quite a time on testing out the Beta criteria to make sure that Beta is stable enough to be released. However, this would not be possible without a freeze period when things are made stable and solid enough to meet the Beta criteria. Usually, the freeze period takes about a week or two, and it is not a quiet period, believe me, so there is not much time frame to release weekly updates for Fedora Beta all year round.

Also, why have two rolling stages, Rawhide (Alpha) and Beta when one rolling stage is sure enough?

If you are interested in newer applications (although I believe that Fedora is a distro that is on the front of the development and our applications are fairly new), you have the following strategies that you can adopt without having to change anything in the global Fedora land:

  1. Use Rawhide, but set up a testing computer that you will update first, make sure it works for you, if not report bugs that bother you and wait until they are fixed or a workaround found, then update to the latest status quo on your main computer. If more people used this strategy, maybe Rawhide could get stable enough for you to use it as you would like to use the Fedora Beta that you are proposing.
  2. Use stable Fedora and allow the updates-testing repository. You will be getting new packages, usually two weeks before they hit the stable repository, while you will be able to maintain the stability of the entire system.
  3. Use Silverblue. You will have the stability of the system and you will be getting the newest versions of applications from Flathub.

As @adamwill already stated, currently there are no idle workforces who would be able to sign up for that much testing to make this proposal happen.

4 Likes
7

Or rather, just use Flathub.

8

Sure, that’s possible, too. :smiley:

9

This is already there.
~3 months of rawhide
~2 months of branched
~1 month of Beta
then release and the cycle starts over. Rawhide continues but has a different upcoming release number at the point each version is branched.

Adding anything different would add a LOT of extra management/development work.

Using rawhide is actually a continuously rolling version. The point where it is branched is where that version becomes the beginning of the beta process for the next release.

1 Like