Announcing the Fedora EDU Spin Preview

[José Matos]

On Thursday 10 July 2008 21:27:37 Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Preview
> binaries are great, because it shows that these particular Spin
> developers are making their best effort to get this working and tested
> so when it comes time to approve things that conversation should go
> smoothly.

The question is a sense more general than just spins, other than the kde 
packages from kde-redhat that I use I have previously used other repositories 
from packages intended to be previews of next version of Fedora but released 
to the current stable release.

>From the top of my head I remember:

- python 2.5
- texlive (to replace tetex)
- emacs 22 (?)
- kernel (Dave had his repository working for some time)

I am sure that there were more, the funny part is that those repositories were 
not "official" - for any definition of official, although the maintainers were 
the Fedora maintainers of the respective packages. So the need of those 
repositories is understood but they are stealth as they fall out of the radar.

I would have expected that by now we had some kind of mechanism to deal with 
such cases other than the non-official stance of every of those repositories. 

I am aware of the perils involved, the existence of another level of testing 
with the resulting lack of attention for rawhide, or even the inter-
compatibility of said repositories (although this has never a concern in 
practice, any problem was quickly identified and fixed).

So I would like to see a figure of separate projects that still fall under the 
umbrella of Fedora, that track experimental packages over the current stable 
version.
The whole process should be run by FESCO on a basis to basis case. This would 
avoid the situation that we have now where we have hybrids (repositories) that 
are neither Fedora but they are created exclusively with the single purpose of 
testing packages for future inclusion in Fedora. Schizophrenic seems like a 
good description of the current behavior. ;-)

-- 
José Abílio