Fedora Extras packaging beta software into production repos, why?

[Josh Boyer]

On Sat, 2006-10-28 at 16:58 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:56:09 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> 
> 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?

No.  And I don't think we should.

Theoretically, the maintainers of the packages know best as to how
stable the software they are packaging is, what the timeline for said
beta is to reach production, etc.  If another maintainer questions this,
then open a bug report against the package explaining why.

That being said, my personal opinion is that "beta" or pre-release
packages should only be done in the devel branch, and only if that beta
has a really good chance of becoming an actual release before the devel
branch is forked for the next Extras release.

As for the third party repo aspect of this, that is quite difficult.
There are potentially tons of third party repos, which already conflict
with each other.  We cannot show preference for one or the other.  That
does not mean that a third party repository maintainer cannot open a
bug.  It just means that we cannot expect Extras maintainers to go
looking for problems in each and every third party repo before updating
something.

josh