Re: RFC: staging repo
David Timms wrote:
Paul Howarth wrote:
> My repo started out just as somewhere to conveniently make available a
> bunch of packages I used on various machines either at home or at
> work. At the time there were, for historical reasons, a mix of various
> different versions of Fedora (some EOL) on the boxes at work and my
> repo included a few up-to-date packages for those old Fedora releases.
> Nowadays I've migrated most of the servers at work over to CentOS or
> RHEL, and the desktops that run Linux run versions that are still in
> their supported lifetimes. However, I still find myself keeping the
> old versions of the packages going, largely "because I can".
So, do many people use/download of those old version packages ?
Very few I suspect though I don't collect stats so I can't be sure. I
know there are people using the EL4 and EL5 versions though, as I get
the occasional email from them...
> So most of the packages I have in my repo are in fact already in
> Fedora or RPM Fusion (at least for the latest release or Rawhide) and
> those that are not tend to be for reasonable reasons, e.g.
> bluefish-unstable, which is the development version of bluefish (which
> I maintain in
I'm guessing that isn't a candidate for rawhide / rpmfusion-x-rawhide,
perhaps because it is perpetually unstable. That is, is it to
essentially test the latest svn code, without concern on whether it
actually largely works on a particular system ?
Perhaps for wider user testing, with easy access to debuginfo to assist
in debugging ?
And there is no attempt at stabilization of the source to wall paper
over the nastiest bugs ?
Upstream actually makes releases of the development version and calls it
"bluefish-unstable". It's parallel-installable with bluefish and has
varying degrees of stability. I'm able to use it on a regular basis
though I don't make extensive use of the feature set. It's basically a
means of getting slightly wider exposure for the development tree, which
is quite different from the official stable version.
Perhaps rpmfusion could have a similar style repo: what could be even
more raw than rawhide ? rawhead ie reference to cvs/svn. A repo where
it's highly likely that stuff won't just work. Perhaps with decent wiki
pages on what needs testing, links to upstream changelogs, commits etc.
Not sure how much usage that would get.
> Fedora), bittorrent 5.x (incompatible with current wxPython
versions
> and virtually dead upstream, which has gone closed source). I have a
> compat-wxPython package to make this work but I *really* don't want to
> maintain that in Fedora.
Or rpmfusion ? I guess that would be against rpmfusion policy since
there is no freedom/licensing issues with that final free release ?
Perhaps there could be an "endofline", "rusty" or similar repo that
keeps otherwise good but old, unmaintained code alive.
BitTorrent 4.x is equally dead upstream but lives on in Fedora. The 4.x
version has a pygtk-based GUI that does still work on current releases,
which is why 5.x never made it into Fedora. I think there's actually
plenty of stuff that's dead upstream but stable and it stays in Fedora
whilst people use it.
The reason I don't want to maintain the compat-wxPython package is more
to do with the maintenance burden being too much for me; if I can't do
it justice, it shouldn't be in there. The same would apply to rpmfusion
- I don't want to maintain things I can't offer any meaningful support on.
Paul.