Fedora Developers Discuss The Idea Of "Lightly Maintained" Packages

Fedora stakeholders and the folks at Red Hat have been discussing the idea of having a "lightly maintained" package repository (or some RPM metadata otherwise to indicate such light maintenance) for packages that are either very new, not receiving much packaging attention, or simply used as a build dependency for other packages.

For the past two months there has been this FESCo ticket around the idea of having a new repository for serving "lightly maintained" packages. In this context it's about packages that are used just as dependencies for other packages but unlikely to be used at scale, packages with open security vulnerabilities that go left unaddressed, or are just more "raw" than accustomed for Fedora packaging standards. This could be either a separate Fedora repository (remember the days of Fedora Extras?) that might be disabled by default or otherwise indicated the package status via RPM metadata.

At this week's FESCo meeting (logs) no action was taken by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee at this time. They are encouraging interested parties to first more broadly discuss the matter on the Fedora developer mailing list and stemming from that submit any formal change proposal for consideration in future Fedora releases. Thus for now it's just waiting to see how it plays out but at least some developers are interested in this concept.