Fedora Extras packaging beta software into production repos, why?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:56:09 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:

> ATrpms is packaging asterisk and friends for quite some time
> now. ATrpms' buildsystem has also enabled Fedora Extras during the
> build procedure to ensure better interoperability, e.g. use BR's out
> of Fedora Extras.
> 
> For some reason Fedora Extras now had to package a beta version of the
> asterisk suite instead of the current release. I'm used to packagers
> at FE ignoring existing packages at other repos which is a bad thing
> per se, but why
> 
> - packaging a beta software that is known to have troubles,
> - creates broken builds for other non-suspecting repos and
> - gets right into production repos like FC5?
> 
> Note that for some packages it really makes sense to use
> beta/prereleases, VCS cuts and the like, but there is no reason to do
> so in this case.
> 
> As a consequence I will not only need to rebuild all of the asterisk
> suite again to pick up the proper dependencies, but also to stop using
> Fedora Extras as a repo for build requirements and start using Epoch
> on clean packages.

This topic came to a sudden end on the same day it was started, without a
clear resolution and without any conclusion on whether including beta
versions of some software is "okay" in this case.

Has FESCo looked into this?