EPEL Update policy for unstable software

Milan Bouchet-Valat nalimilan at club.fr
Sat Sep 20 14:49:37 UTC 2014


Hi!

I've just packaged the Julia language for technical computing for
Fedora, and I thought it would be very useful to add it to EPEL7, since
a large share of the user base is in academia, on RHEL, CentOS or
Scientific Linux machines.

But Julia is still unstable, and evolving at a rapid pace. Though
compatibility is preserved as much as possible, a few breaking changes
are introduced in each major version, about twice a year. On the other
hand, until 1.0 is reached, it does not make sense to keep a beta
version of Julia and maintain it for years: it will soon become
completely useless and even misleading for users.

So I wonder whether it makes sense to package it for EPEL7, or whether
I'd better wait for 1.0 to be out (which may take a couple of years). Or
can I keep a package in the testing repo until that point?

Thanks for your help


More information about the epel-devel mailing list