Catching up with Fedora Quality Assurance

It has been a while since I wrote my article for the Fedora Magazine. This is mostly due to a busy schedule with testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1,

, and RHDS releases, but I missed my passion of writing. It is never too late to catch back up, though, especially when it comes to catching up with a true friend like Fedora.

It is a fantastic thing in Fedora that no matter how much time you have to be away from it, It welcomes you back open-hardheartedly without complaint.

What’s happening in Fedora Quality Assurance?

It took almost two half-days (which in total turns out to be one day) to catch up with the things currently happening in Fedora. Kudos goes to our Fedora Project leader, Matthew Miller, who never forgets to write his awesome series, “Five Things in Fedora” for Fedora Magazine. I did read my favorite mailing list (i.e. fedora testing mailing list), and oh my! How fast the Fedora world is. I think seven days of a non-Fedora life is equal to two days of Fedora life! I read nearly 200 emails, and honestly I did skip some. But overall, it gave me a clear picture of what is happening in Fedora Quality Assurance. I also read the logs of some IRC channels like #fedora-qa, #fedora-blocker-review, and others.

All of this gave me a nice insight to what is currently happening in Fedora, and specifically more about Fedora Quality Assurance, which for me is my favorite part! So far, the hottest news is the availability of Release Candidate 5 for testing in Fedora 21 and up. Details are on the test mailing list. The list of the blocker bugs reveal what accepted blockers were and what is fixed. It was a little unclear which Release Candidate has which bug fixed and which ones reverted, but I will try to bifurcate.

Release Candidate Overview

• RC1: 11/28/2014 07:04 PM
• RC2: 12/03/2014 01:15 AM
• RC3: Never Released
  • This never made it out of the compose process. Rel-Eng made a small mistake, so they started over, and it was easier to call the retry “RC4” than to clean up the failed attempt and call the retry “RC3”.
• RC4: 12/03/2014 03:50 PM
  • RC2 and RC4 should be the live images that have correct fontconfig caches. Otherwise, RC2 and RC4 should be nearly identical.
• RC5: 12/04/2014 08:03 AM
  • The difference between RC4 and RC5 is that the changes to python-blivet and pyparted that were introduced in RC1 to fix bug #1166598 have been reverted, as they were found to cause more serious problems than they fixed.

Get involved!

If you noticed, within 24 hours, we had three releases. Fedora is running very fast to meet its Final Release, which is scheduled for December 9th. Come on, let’s contribute to achieve the biggest milestone in Fedora history, where you will have three new awesome editions: Workstation, Server, and Cloud!

Join #fedora-qa and don’t miss the fun!