Reminder: Please help test new updates and provide feedback!

[Andrew David Wong]

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Dear Qubes Community,

If you're an experienced Qubes user, one great way to help the Qubes
developers is by testing new updates and providing feedback. It only
takes a minute to set up:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/testing/

Once you're receiving updates that are in testing, the important thing
is to let us know what does and doesn't work for you. This can be as
simple as reacting with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on the
appropriate GitHub issue. The positive feedback (i.e., nothing bad has
happened) is just as important as the negative feedback, since this
helps us decide when it's okay to migrate packages to stable. This
results in a faster development cycle for Qubes and a better
experience for everyone. Thank you for contributing!

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org

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[qtpie]

Andrew David Wong:

> Dear Qubes Community,
>
> If you're an experienced Qubes user, one great way to help the Qubes
> developers is by testing new updates and providing feedback. It only
> takes a minute to set up:
>
> https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/testing/
>
> Once you're receiving updates that are in testing, the important thing
> is to let us know what does and doesn't work for you. This can be as
> simple as reacting with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on the
> appropriate GitHub issue. The positive feedback (i.e., nothing bad has
> happened) is just as important as the negative feedback, since this
> helps us decide when it's okay to migrate packages to stable. This
> results in a faster development cycle for Qubes and a better
> experience for everyone. Thank you for contributing!
>
>

What should I expect when I run testing on my production machine? Only
outlier issues related to specific hardware or uncommon usage? How about
security? Do people on the Qubes team run testing on their production
machine? Please clarify this, I'd like to help but first need to know
what to expect, especially what the security state is.

I have read https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/testing of course, but this
does not really clarify this if you havent been involved with testing
before.

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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On Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 07:47:00PM +0000, qtpie wrote:
> Andrew David Wong:
> > Dear Qubes Community,
> >
> > If you're an experienced Qubes user, one great way to help the Qubes
> > developers is by testing new updates and providing feedback. It only
> > takes a minute to set up:
> >
> > https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/testing/
> >
> > Once you're receiving updates that are in testing, the important thing
> > is to let us know what does and doesn't work for you. This can be as
> > simple as reacting with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on the
> > appropriate GitHub issue. The positive feedback (i.e., nothing bad has
> > happened) is just as important as the negative feedback, since this
> > helps us decide when it's okay to migrate packages to stable. This
> > results in a faster development cycle for Qubes and a better
> > experience for everyone. Thank you for contributing!
>
> What should I expect when I run testing on my production machine? Only
> outlier issues related to specific hardware or uncommon usage? How about
> security? Do people on the Qubes team run testing on their production
> machine? Please clarify this, I'd like to help but first need to know
> what to expect, especially what the security state is.

There may happen occasional issues affecting availability of the system
(some service not working, some VM not starting). Example from this
summer: due to kernel bug in Linux 5.2.x[1], VMs didn't started
property. It was enough to switch to older kernel to workaround the
issue until proper fix was developed.

Generally I wouldn't recommend enabling testing repositories in your
sole environment (although I do run it everywhere). But for example
keeping a template with testing repositories disabled as a fallback
should be enough to warrant enabling testing in some other templates.

As for security issues - we are treating it very seriously, and security
issues affecting even only testing packages get proper attention (QSB
etc). And thanks to Qubes architecture, are not more common than in
stable release.

[1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5199

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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