RFC: staging repo

[Paul Howarth]

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.