We have been working away at getting epel8 ready (short status: we have builds and are building fedpkg and bodhi and all the other tools maintainers need to deal with packages and hope to have some composes next week), and I would like to introduce a new thing we are trying with epel8: The epel8-playground.

epel8-playground is another branch for all epel8 packages. By default when a package is setup for epel8 both branches are made, and when maintainers do builds in the epel8 branch, fedpkg will build for _both_ epel8 and epel8-playground. epel8 will use the bodhi updates system with an updates-testing and stable repo. epel8-playground will compose every night and use only one repo.

The idea here is that maintainers can (if they choose) modify the package.cfg file in the epel8 branch to only build for epel8, and then use the epel8-playground branch (and it's sperate repos/builds):

• To test out some new version of the package that might not be stable yet.
• To test out some new packaging of the package
• To test a major version change of the package that they want to land at the next epel8 minor release.
• To build a package that will never be stable enough for epel8, but still could be useful to some.

At minor RHEL releases (ie, 8.1, 8.2) people can pull in big changes from playground to the main epel8 packages. Since people will be upgrading and paying more attention than usual anyhow at those points, it's a great chance to do that change, but also you want to make sure it's panned out, so you can test before hand in playground.

We hope that this feature will be useful to some folks. Do let us know on the epel-devel list or in our next EPEL sig meeting!