= Proposal topic =

Decide when is most appropriate to enable and disable updates-testing by default in pre-releases.

= Overview =

Fedora enables updates-testing by default on all pre-releases up to final RCs. While this results in more testing of things in updates-testing, it comes at the cost of reducing the amount of testing the main release tree gets as a whole. The topic of when to stop enabling updates-testing by default arose in the 22 Aug meeting [1] and was tabled until a "f16 retrospective" type meeting. As far as I can tell that means now. :)

= Problem space =

All branches that have not yet been released enable updates-testing by default until final RC composes begin, at which point an update to the fedora-release package disables updates-testing automatically. This results in two issues:

1. Upgraded systems end up with installed packages that are effectively orphaned because they never made it out of testing. This can cause un-intuitive breakage when one attempts to install packages later on.
2. The non-testing prerelease gets minimal testing before RC composes begin. Specifically, since most systems run with updates-testing enabled the only time non-testing gets much QA as a whole is at alpha/beta/RC compose times. Even then, immediately after one installs an alpha or beta it gets updated to testing anyway. This at least partially defeats the purpose of running bodhi for unreleased branches.

We currently address issue 1 with documentation that recommends running {{{yum distro-sync}}} after upgrading from a pre-release [2, 3]. Issue 2 is a tradeoff that has not been clearly addressed.

= Solution Overview =

Some possible resolutions are:
1. Keep things as-is. That is, leave updates-testing on by default until RC compose time and expect those who upgrade from beta to manually downgrade.
1. Switch updates-testing off at beta and expect those who upgrade from alpha to manually downgrade.
1. Never enable updates-testing by default. (Mainly here for completeness's sake)

= Active Ingredients =

This mainly affects QA and rel-eng. I sent messages to the appropriate lists in February [4], but received no responses.

= Owners =

gholms

= References =

[1] http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teams/fesco/fesco.2011-08-22-16.59.log.html#l-92

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_from_pre-release_to_final#After_updating_to_final.2C_why_does_yum_complain_about_mismatched_package_versions_even_though_my_rawhide_repo_is_disabled.3F

[3] http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teams/fesco/fesco.2011-03-02-17.30.log.html#l-354

[4] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/rel-eng/2011-February/011584.html