Why is the fedora.us (Fedora Extras) repository growing so slowly??

[Jaap A. Haitsma]

Hi,

First of all I want to mention that I'm very grateful for what the 
people in Fedora Extras are  doing.

I noticed that the number of packages in Fedora Extras (I'll use this 
name to refer to the repository at fedora.us for the rest of this mail)
is growing rather slowly on average 2 package announcements a day for 
november (which are both updates and new packages).

Also I noticed that the QA queue is really full. 295 packages are 
waiting for QA. And Warren Togami seems to be the owner of about 80 
percent of these. This guy must be making 40 hour days.

So I think he needs some help if we want to make fedora extras live up 
to what's in the FAQ (Second bullet)

[Quote]
How does Fedora differ from FreshRPMS or other repositories?

     * Fedora apt/yum enforces GPG signature checking for your protection.
     * All other repositories are made by a single person. Fedora can 
have a lot more packages, and of higher quality, because we have have 
many package developers working together on a common goal.
[/Quote]

What I understand is that QA has to be approved by two developers and 
one of a trusted fedora.us developer which check the spec files and stuff.

If there aren't too many developers this can take quite a while I guess.

I for one (as a non packager) wouldn't mind testing binary packages 
which are in the testing or unstable queues and I'm interested in.

My proposal would be, to have packagers post a message that a RPM is in 
the testing or unstable queue and needs testing. Normal users can then 
just test if they work well and send a message back on the fedora-test 
list if it works or doesn't. I saw that in Bugzilla that QA/packager 
people are doing all this.
In my opinion this would save a lot of time for the real QA people, 
because most of the bugs will be gone.


I think this is more or less how the testing of Fedora Core worked.

Any thoughts??

Jaap