[EPEL-devel] rethinking the epel testing

Hi, As it is now in the EPEL package update process the testing phase takes 14 days (double of Fedora). My impression is that this testing phase is quite long and unhelpful for the following reasons: 1. The majority of people who use EPEL are not Fedora users. They are more likely to report a bug they encounter, in CentOS forums (or RHEL) rather than understand fedora process and the need for karma. 2. The testing-imposed delay does not help detecting failures such as a library ABI breakage as in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1411021 My guess is that these systems upgrade on even slower cycle than 14 days (it may even be the RHEL/Centos cycles). Most likely only then an issue will be spotted and the 14-day delay prevents from providing fast a fix. I do not have any good suggestion, other than reducing the long period of testing to the Fedora defaults (7 days). A better approach would be to tie more to centos processes, and allow centos registered users to give karma and test, but I have no idea how feasible it is, and whether centos users will actually get involved in EPEL. regards, Nikos [0]. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2017-63c298b073