Fedora Extras packaging beta software into production repos, why?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:11:23 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:

> Axel Thimm wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps FE needs a testing section (many other repos have such
> > stability sections, e.g. "updates" has, kde-redhat has, ATrpms has,
> > freshrpms has and fedora.us also had).
> 
> uh huh. +1

And everytime this topic comes up, it seems the consequences of adding a
full "testing" repo are forgotten.

First of all, it's another repository, another target to watch for package
maintainers who might depend on stuff that's pre-released in "testing".

Packages published in "testing" are available to every subsequent build
job that targets "testing", too. They can be build dependencies. When
moving packages from "testing" to "stable", it's means "all or nothing"
for a dependency-chain. Same applies to withdrawing packages from
"testing". Same applies to holding up packages.

Would such a "testing" repository be popular enough? At fedora.us, we've
found that it added extra burden with very little benefit. Same applied to
the "unstable" repository. Who really does the testing? Usually you get
the bug reports as soon as something appears in "stable", not before
that. The few "testing" users would report broken dependencies. But most
run-time testing is not done before packages are used on a day-to-day
basis, actually.

As nice as some features like a "scratch" repository sound, it needs
a well thought out proposal instead of just a +1.