openSUSE Factory is the head development branch for the openSUSE distribution releases. As such the explosive mixture of changes and new versions throughout the whole stack from kernel to the desktops made openSUSE Factory a challenging distribution to use even for hard core distribution hackers. To make Factory usable for a wider audience of distribution developers it had to be made more stable while retaining the short turnaround times needed for a bleeding edge distribution. openSUSE therefore introduced a number of automated and semi-automated tools for review and QA into the development workflow to reach that goal. The result is now called openSUSE Tumbleweed, a fully rolling binary distribution based on openSUSE Factory. This talk explains the development process and the tools used to turn openSUSE Factory into Tumbleweed.
Target audience are distribution integrators in general. All of them have problems like "does this new dracut submission break the installer or render the system unbootable?". With the process used by openSUSE many such questions can be answered by the machine, automatically. The process outlined in this talk is not only useful for rolling distributions like Tumbleweed but also for stable releases. It helped significantly to increase the quality resp avoid regressions between beta and RC versions during the release process.
Speakers: Stephan Kulow