RFC: staging repo

[David Timms]

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 ?

> 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 ?

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.

> 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.

DaveT.