EPEL Proposal #2: EPEL Rolling Rawhide

An EPEL rawhide may sound like an oxymoron for having an always building main tree for a release that is known for its plodding slowness. However there are methods to the madness as people brought it up at FOSDEM Brussels.

Rolling Release Style. In this version there is a branch where many Fedora packages are rebuilt against EL-5/6/7. The packages in this release are always the latest that can be compiled against the release and all 'updates' and fixes are done upstream versus in the package. The epel file tree would look something like this:

EPEL/{5,6,7}
EPEL/testing/{5,6,7}
EPEL/rawhide/{5,6,7}

Packages in EPEL/{5,6,7} are ones that are going to be kept stable until they can no longer be supported. Packages in EPEL/testing/ are were updates to the mainline packages are kept. The general idea is that Fedora packagers can freely fork to EPEL/rawhide with no care about whether it works or not. If people are interested enough to help fix it they can send it to the packager but if it doesn't build and no one fixes it.. it isn't there. If people do care about the package, they can sponsor it and those would be the ones in EPEL regular. These packages would follow the agreed upon rules about updates and lack of big changes.

Pros: Allows for more packages to be newer for more users.
Cons: More channels for release engineering and packagers to deal with.