Fedora Extras packaging beta software into production repos, why?

[Jesse Keating]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 09:36, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 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.

This is something I have to deal with internally many many times a week.  Our 
updates-testing collection does not self update, so any time somebody needs 
to build a set of packages for testing (kde, gnome, mono stuff, any low level 
package, etc...) I have to do some tagging of some packages to make them 
available in the buildroot, which defeats the purpose of keeping them 
separate to begin with.

To combat this, what we need is the ability to submit a build and request that 
certain packages be brought into that specific buildroot, provide a list of 
package builds that could be found in the packageDB no matter what collection 
they may be a part of.  This is kind of scary too and I don't think its a 
great solution, but I don't have many others off the top of my head to deal 
with the split between testing and live.  Unfortunately I also feel that 
the -testing repo does serve a good purpose.  It  would have caught the KDE 
fiasco in Core5 (or was it 4?), we make great use of it for testing kernel 
updates, or adding new features, or doing major version bumps.  I see the 
only other alternative as being personal repo pages (very low probability of 
widespread testing), or a much more restrictive rule set on what is allowed 
to be issued as an 'update' to a released product.

For development/, please.  Development/ exists for people to test the packages 
that are candidates for the next release.  Having test repo for a test repo 
seems silly to me.  Your chance to validate the package for the next release 
_is_ rawhide.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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