RFC: staging repo

[manuel wolfshant]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> 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
>
I'd rather see references in our wiki (something similar to 
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories ) then hosting 
packages which have not been reviewed.