RFC: staging repo

[Paul Howarth]

Andrea Musuruane wrote:
> 2008/12/15 Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info>:
>>> I don't think it is a good idea.
>> You are free to do so. But do you have any other ideas how to get other 3rd
>> party repos under the RPM Fusion hood to get rid of the repo mess that
>> confuses users and results in repo mixing problems? Merging Driobble,
>> Freshrpms and 99,5% or Livna was good, but IMHO way more is needed.
> 
> Let me rephrase that. I think that if we convince external repository
> maintainer to drop their repo and use our infra (IMHO that is 95% of
> the work), then we could easily convince them to submit their package
> for review here.
> 
> Sure, more is needed, I couldn't agree more. We need those 3rd party
> repo maintainers to join us like we did with the original merger. The
> real question is what they are going to do. I think we can start
> inviting them (or inviting them again) on this mailing list and start
> discussing with them this question.

I maintain one of the third-party repos listed on the wiki page 
(city-fan.org), and I'm an existing Fedora contributor, and soon to be 
RPM Fusion contributor too.

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 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 
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.

So that's why my repo exists and why it's unlikely ever to merge into 
Fedora/RPM Fusion.

Paul.