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Fedora's New Test Lead Plans Changes 32

Posted by timothy from the vermillion-chapeau dept.
lisah writes "According to a NewsForge article by Bruce Byfield, new Fedora test lead Will Woods has a laundry list of changes he plans on making to enhance the Fedora testing process. 'There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),' says Woods. 'It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again.'"
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Fedora's New Test Lead Plans Changes More

Fedora's New Test Lead Plans Changes

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  • From the article: "First introduced to testing at Compaq and IBM, Woods gained enough experience that he was hired two years ago when Red Hat needed someone to develop test automation tools." Testing at Compaq? Compaq tests things!?
    • Well, they did kinda reverse engineer certain IBM PC chips from scratch, spawning the entire PC clone industry.
    • Testing at Compaq? Compaq tests things!?

      Oh yes, Crapaq has been testing for years... testing users' patience, testing the ability of tech support to fix their malfunctioning boxes, and testing the limits of poor customer support.

    • >>Testing at Compaq? Compaq tests things!?

      They test their customer's patience. Does that count?

    • Re:Compaq, huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Chris Snook ( 872473 )
      Hey, you're letting IBM off easy. IBM is a huge company with many product groups that have little interaction with each other, even though their products end up being used together routinely. They will test an extremely complex system of separately-sold hardware and software components with precisely one combination of firmware and driver levels, and they will repeat this process periodically as the components change, so if you buy all the parts at once, everything works fine, but if you buy them at diffe
    • From the article: "First introduced to testing at Compaq and IBM, Woods gained enough experience that he was hired two years ago when Red Hat needed someone to develop test automation tools." Testing at Compaq? Compaq tests things!?

      Well, yeah. AAMOF, I used to work with Will there; we were both in the XC Cluster group. I can't speak for every group, but XC was very conscientious about testing.

      -Mike

  • Say What? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adavies42 ( 746183 ) on Thursday July 20, 2006 @09:43AM (#15749400)
    Did it take anyone else about five tries to parse that headline?
  • I hope they fix that nasty bug with Rhythmbox where it shipped with no list of internet radio stations whatsoever, as well as no mp3, aac, or wma support. That sort of defeated the whole point of the application. And I couldn't help but notice that the Totem movie player, can't actually play any movies. Oh, and the helix player doesn't actually work either. The workarounds consist of upgrading from unsupported repositories and generally mucking about in your root account.

    Hopefully these new test procedures
    • Unlikely...
      The problem is Patents, and licensing. If Red Hat wants to license, say, mp3 codec, it needs to pay royalties to Thomson to distribute. Is it likely that Red Hat are not going to pay for licenses for you, since they give you Fedora for free. Downloading the Realplayer RPMs and installing them is no more difficult than installing Realplayer on Windows. In fact, if you double click an RPM in GNOME, GNOME will ask for your root password automatically, and run system-install-packages. Real Networks h
      • A simple thing... i want to create a playlist. I want to take 10 of my MP3 files and make a playlist that RealPlayer would play.

        So far I have been unable to do this. If there is a way to do this, how come it is not intuitive at all?

        And I wish there was something with the simplicity of WinAMP - a player that supports MANY patented file types, and is available for... FREE. If there was a player like that for Linux that you could install with the ease of RealPlayer, I would have been VERY happy. As it st
        • Install XMMS. Its a Winamp clone (in essence) and will accept Shoutcast mp3 streams, and m3u/pls playlists. You'll need to download the unofficial codecs as set out in http://www.fedorafaq.org/ [fedorafaq.org]

          I have to say I prefer the clean interface that RealPlayer for Linux uses - much rather that than the crud that comes with the Windows version.

          If you prefer to stay 100% legit (depending on where you are, that is), I believe there is a gstreamer plugin that is licensed for mp3 that you can buy/download. This will make

    • I hope they fix that nasty bug with Rhythmbox where it shipped with no list of internet radio stations whatsoever, as well as no mp3, aac, or wma support. That sort of defeated the whole point of the application. And I couldn't help but notice that the Totem movie player, can't actually play any movies. Oh, and the helix player doesn't actually work either. The workarounds consist of upgrading from unsupported repositories and generally mucking about in your root account.

      First, I don't know about the issue

    • It's not Fedora (or Red Hat's) fault that the licensing of those products and the US Laws on those subjects are so anal. Welcome to the age of DRM, patents and vendor lock-in due to the 2 previous reasons.

      If you didn't know in the USA you are not allowed to reverse-engineer or even include software that is reverse engineered. You are not allowed to import it, export it or use it. Thus MP3, WMV, AAC support or the DRM-versions of it can not be included in a distro for/created in the USA. If you do, you ge

  • I'm Confused (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by WebHostingGuy ( 825421 )
    The summary seems to imply that Fedora will now be less a beta for RHEL but the article discusses in depth how Fedora is now going to be using testing tools from RHEL and how they obviously have obligations to RHEL. If this doesn't provide more evidence that Fedora *is* just a beta for RHEL I don't what will.

    • But I want Fedora to be a testing place for the next RHEL. I run Fedora on my home network, and 41 (soon to be 89) RHEL boxes at work, plus 3 Fedora Core ones, and widespread testing of packages before they get into RHEL is a Good Thing (TM)

      • I don't think that most people mind that the fedora project is a place that does QA for RHEL. As a Fedora user, I don't mind if the rawhide testers are doing free QA for RHEL. The problem is that Fedora has no real process in place to ensure that the rawhide process produces a quality product for both the Fedora and RHEL users. Red Hat needs Fedora end users to find significant flaws in their product. RedHat applies these fixes and then branches off a particular Fedora release and tests it in order to p
    • And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?
      • Absolutely nothing. It seems the context of what I was saying was missed. I use RHEL extensively and am glad that Fedora is used to bug test new releases. My post was confused as why they don't want to be seen as the bug testers for RHEL.

        They obviously are the bug testers: they have obligations to RHEL and use the same tools now. This is a good thing. My confusion is why does Fedora want to distance itself away from this? That's what the Slashdot summary seems to indicate: that the Fedora developers
    • So you're saying that because they use tools to test Fedora, that are tools used to test RHEL, that Fedora is just a test RHEL? So umm, then what were the tools being used on before? Since they were being used on RHEL before Fedora. Either ways, this is moot since, there is nothing wrong with Fedora being testing for RHEL since they serve different purposes.

  • Well, at least he is honest. (Score:4, Informative)

    by viper21 ( 16860 ) <scott@NoSPaM.iqfoundry.com> on Thursday July 20, 2006 @10:45AM (#15749838) Homepage
    It's nice to see them acknowledge a testing issue, and present options to the community on how to best approach the problem.

    The amazing thing is all of the people that are critical of Fedora. Even if it were a testbed for RedHat, it is a free distro. that is widely used--especially by the critics. I have no problems with it, and we use it on several development machines here.

    If the critics would step up and help solve the problems, they'd quickly run out of things to complpain about.

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