RFC: Fedora.us "unstable" section

[Aurelien Bompard]

Hello,

I have a proposal for the redefinition of fedora.us' "unstable" section.
Right now, it contains "add-ons with severe known defects or that may
interfere with other software" (from FedoraChannels). It currently contains
a dozen of packages.
I think it could be used for software which have been checked for packaging
errors, which build, but which haven't been deeply tested to work properly
(at run-time).
This would solve the problem we currently have in the QA queue with the pile
of programming languages. They could be spec-checked, built, tested with
"language --version" just to make sure they don't segfault, and put in
unstable. This would adress the problem we have with packages in QA which
are used by too few people or are too complex to be correctly tested at
run-time.

But we don't want to turn the unstable section into a second "pending"
repository: there must be a way for packages to move into "testing" after
being tested. For this task, we could require the usual 2 GPG-signed votes
by people who use the packages. Since this type of vote doesn't imply
checking the package for errors, there are more chances that people do it.
It's just a "Yes, it runs properly". We could even drop the GPG requirement
if we have to.

There must be some place to put the vote. The voter could open a bug against
the new component, but I don't think that would happen. We could also add
another step between "Verified" and "Closed" but I don't know if it is
possible in bugzilla. This other step would only be used for packages in the
"unstable" section. Third option: we could use a specific keyword in
bugzilla, and leave the package in "Verified" state (or another one, like
"Reopened" for example). This would define a new queue (again). I think
that the main objective is to make it as easy as possible to vote for a
package in the "unstable" section, because by definition these packages are
used by few people.
There are probably other options, but that's all I can see right now.

What do you think of that ? 


Aurélien
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