Why is the fedora.us (Fedora Extras) repository growing so slowly??

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 21:52:35 +0100, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:

> First of all I want to mention that I'm very grateful for what the 
> people in Fedora Extras are  doing.
> 
> I noticed that the number of packages in Fedora Extras (I'll use this 
> name to refer to the repository at fedora.us for the rest of this mail)
> is growing rather slowly on average 2 package announcements a day for 
> november (which are both updates and new packages).
> 
> Also I noticed that the QA queue is really full. 295 packages are 
> waiting for QA. 

As mentioned earlier, a lot of those packages have a very special target
group and are in need of people who are familiar with the packaged
software. E.g. lots of programming languages.

> And Warren Togami seems to be the owner of about 80 
> percent of these. This guy must be making 40 hour days.

He's just the default person who's assigned to new package requests.  The
actual packager is listed in the "reporter" field. Package updates are
assigned to the actual package maintainer instead. 

But otherwise it's correct that some of the packagers maintain many a high
number packages.

> So I think he needs some help if we want to make fedora extras live up 
> to what's in the FAQ (Second bullet)
> 
> [Quote]
> How does Fedora differ from FreshRPMS or other repositories?
> 
>      * Fedora apt/yum enforces GPG signature checking for your protection.
>      * All other repositories are made by a single person. Fedora can 
> have a lot more packages, and of higher quality, because we have have 
> many package developers working together on a common goal.
> [/Quote]
> 
> What I understand is that QA has to be approved by two developers and 
> one of a trusted fedora.us developer which check the spec files and stuff.
> 
> If there aren't too many developers this can take quite a while I guess.

It's also an indication that there's no interest in some of the packages
in the queue.
 
> I for one (as a non packager) wouldn't mind testing binary packages 
> which are in the testing or unstable queues and I'm interested in.

If you're also interested in helping with package requests but are not
familiar with rebuilding src.rpms, simply add yourself to the "Cc" field
of such a bugzilla entry and ask whether the packager could provide a
prebuilt binary for testing.  That however bears a security risk for you.
 
> My proposal would be, to have packagers post a message that a RPM is in 
> the testing or unstable queue and needs testing. Normal users can then 
> just test if they work well and send a message back on the fedora-test 
> list if it works or doesn't. I saw that in Bugzilla that QA/packager 
> people are doing all this.

Approved packages are pre-published in the "pending" repository tree
(which is similar to Fedora Core's "Test Updates") where interested people
can check out the prebuilt binary rpms and report success/failure in the
corresponding package request bug ticket.

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