half baked idea for further baking: "fedora-ugly" repo

[Miroslav Suchý]

On 02/09/2014 07:25 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> This idea has come up several times at DevConf, and I thought I'd throw it
> out here so it can maybe get further development and discussion.

Just subscribed, so coming little bit later to discussion :)

> So, the proposal: a new repository in the Fedora Project which I am
> tentatively calling "Fedora Ugly". It could be "Fedora Staging", but I think
> that promises a bit much (some things may remain here for a really, really
> long time). This repo would provide an integration space where packages from
> diverse COPRs repos could come together, and also be more discoverable by
> other Fedora developers and users (just add one repo).

What would be content? All Copr packages. I could not imagine who would wanted all of those weird packages.

What I would make sense to me is mimic "experimental"[1] from Debian. This is branch with packages, which may soon land 
in "unstable" (which is more or less equivalent of rawhide without broken deps).

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianExperimental

It would be opt-in and by checking some box, you would make promise that this is something which you plan to deliver in 
Fedora soon. And I would even restrict it to packages which are already in Fedora or Package review has been already 
submitted.


Or you can create Outer Fedora. Which would match 3rd ring from Fedora.next, where would be layered application which 
are too big to get in Fedora in reasonable time. And again opt-in. And by subscribing in, you would promise to build 
into that repo only stable packages (and build nightly into different project in Copr).


>   - degree to which packages would be allowed here forever vs. encouraged
>     to improve so they can eventually be in the main repo is an open question

I would be ok with such soft policy as is in
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/resources#s4.6.4
(see end of section 4.6.4.3)

>   - repo would be off by default, but easily enabled in yum or in Gnome
>     Software

Note that this would be possible soon with each individual Copr repository anyway by:
   dnf copr enable msuchy/myproject
https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/copr.git/tree/dnf-plugin/copr_hook.py
(currently under development)

>   - packages would be signed, possibly by a different key from the main
>     Fedora one.
>   - signing could be automatic rather than manual

This is not trivial! It would mean either rebuilds in Koji. Or setup another instance of Sigul, and if you do that you 
can set it up for Corp too. But both are quite tricky.

>   - ugly-testing or ugly-updates repo, and rolling release vs versioning? to
>     be figured out!

+1 to rolling
   - against last branched version in case of "Outer Fedora"
   - against rawhide in case of "experimental"


-- 
Miroslav Suchy, RHCE, RHCDS
Red Hat, Senior Software Engineer, #brno, #devexp, #fedora-buildsys