Testing -> stable?

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 26.08.2007 17:35, Mike McGrath wrote:
> There's been a lot of conversations about the testing -> stable process 
> on this list, on IRC and just in general chats.  Can someone explain 
> what the current consensus is?  I have branding concerns.

Well, nothing new got decided yet. So the current plan is still the old:

- all new and updated packages go to testing
- security updates go straight to stable or to testing for 24h and then
get moved to stable
- when a RHEL quarterly update is due we do what we did when we
announced EPEL; e.g. make sure all deps are fulfilled in the repo
(testing in this case) and expect the packages are working and move the
packages to a new dir (e.g. 5.1/) and create a symlink from 5 -> 5.1
(thus people staying on 5.0 can stick to EPEL 5.0 if they want); cycle
starts anew here and testing will get build for 5.2

What is under discussion is afaics this ( points with * are my option on
the issue):

- move new packages to current stable more often

 * I'd say that should be fine if they were in testing for some time
(four weeks maybe?). But who is willing to do that work? Someone would
need to prepare a repo locally, move all packages that fall under this
rule over and make sure all deps are still satisfied in the porper repo.
Then hand the list of to-be-moved-to-stable packages to one of the
signers and let him move it over (when we have the proper tools in
place, which is in the works; thx to mschwendt).

- move updated packages to stable more often

 * if there is a strong need to move a package it is allowed according
to the policy. But for the other updates I think we manage EPEL similar
to how RHEL does it: non-crucial updates go into a quarterly update and
no major updates if there isn't a reasons for them. Just "latest and
greatest" is IMHO not the reason

- manage EPEL more like Fedora {,Extras}

 * afaics most people in the buildup phase wanted a stable EPEL and I
really think that should continue to be our #1 goal. But I see a need
and interest for a "more up2date packages" EPEL repo. That what I call
EPEL-rolling; I'm fine with having it in parallel to the stable repo.
But do we have the man-power to start this yet?


CU
thl