RFC: staging repo

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi all!

I suppose a lot of people won't like the following idea (some people 
will say that it's totally crazy and will hurt Fedora/RPM Fusion), but 
I'll put it up for comments nevertheless:


Should we open a "staging" repo in addition to the free and nonfree 
repos which would hold unreviewed packages that could be improved in the 
staging area in a wiki-like style and then easily transferred to the 
proper repos?


Background: there are way to many 3rd party repos out there that hold a 
lot of useful Fedora packages -- see 
http://rpmfusion.org/FedoraThirdPartyRepos for examples. It seems it's 
to complicated, time consuming or simply not worth the trouble for the 
package maintainers to bring those packages trough the review to get 
them into Fedora's or RPM Fusion's proper repos.

I for example had asked Gérard Milmeister (gemi) if he wanted to submit 
PovRay to RPM Fusion nonfree (he has it in this gemi repo), as I 
seldomly (maybe once a year for about 10 or 30 minutes) need it for 
benchmarking systems. He answered

> I would have rather have someone already involved with rpmfusion take
> over the package. My repository IS in fact meant for other people to
> use the packages as a basis for inclusion in "offical" Fedora
> repositories.  [...]

I suppose other add-on repo maintainers have similar or other good 
reasons to avoid the time consuming review process. Which is 
understandable, but far from ideal for Fedora/RPM Fusion. Hence the 
above idea; the maintainers of external repos thus would use our cvs, 
build and download infra (makes it things easier for them) and others 
maintainers could help to improve the packages in a wiki-like way (which 
results in better packages that likely are easy to review later).


Yes, I'm well aware that this has a big downside over time: Why review 
packages for the proper repo all all when there is a staging repo? I 
have no good answer to that besides making it a bit harder then usually 
  to find and use the staging repo.

But I thing it's worth the risk trying, as that way we get a lot of 
packages under our hood and from there into the proper RPM Fusion and 
Fedora repos, resulting in a better user experience and thus happier users.

Comments?

Cu
knurd