[arch-dev-public] putting "beta" software in [testing]

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 4:54 PM, RedShift <redshift at pandora.be> wrote:
> Allan McRae wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> coreutils-8.0 has been released but flagged beta because of some fairly
>> large changes in rm which now uses gnulib's hierarchy traversal (= faster)
>> and many changes to gnulib in the area of filesystem primitives.  I found
>> the snapshot before this fully usable, and will do a "make check/test" to
>> ensure everything is working as it should.
>>
>> I would like to put it in [testing] _without_ the option of it every
>> moving to [core].  I know we do this for some software, but never anything
>> so "core" to the system that I know of.
>> So...  can I use [testing] for testing in this case?
>>
>> Allan
>>
>>
>
> Since the general consensus is that "testing" is proving ground for packages
> intended to be moved to core/extra, I don't think putting beta software
> there is a good idea. Maybe we can create a new repository, called
> "staging", that replaces the current "testing" repository and use the
> "testing" repository for really experimental stuff like beta software.

Two points here.
a) The software WILL make it to core/extra, just at a later version
b) We often have versions in testing that get bumped without ever
hitting core/extra. This seems to parallel this case here

The only thing I'm wary of is the fact that it IS beta and could
possibly bork some systems harder than we'd expect. But, I guess I
trust the coreutils guys, at least