Fedora equivalent to Ubuntu unstable PPA

[mfaine]

I've noticed a lot of beta software is made available to Ubuntu users in unstable package repositories. I've used Ubuntu before and know that it is a simple matter to enable an unstable ppa and install some unsupported but probably working well enough software.

I have built xbmc eden from source and it works okay but seems to crash a lot on any sort of edge use case (plugins, streaming, anything other than normal video playing) and so I'd like to see if a pre-built distribution would do better but I can't seem to find one for Fedora 16 - and that is when I realized that I never see anything like an unstable PPA for Fedora - does such a thing exist? Is RPM Fusion the only game in town? If so, do they have any unstable repositories?

[Dan]

What you are looking for is probably either Rawhide (the next release being built) or the testing repos. (software being actively tested before inclusion in the regular repo) Google either or both here on the forums for details.

[PabloTwo]

Both Fedora and RPMFusion repos have "updates-testing" repos, which are disabled by default. Packages in the "*-updates-testing" repos are not necessarily unstable, but that is generally where newer versions of a package reside for awhile before they are "pushed" into the regular repos. The idea being, users who want to try out the newer package from the testing repo's can provide, well, testing of those packages to see if they are really ready for discimination into the regular repos. Of course, that only really works if users who do try packages from the testing repos file bug reports if and when they do run into issues with it.

You can temporarily enable any specfic updates-testing repo or all of them at the yum command line. If I wanted to check if there was a newer xbmc package sitting in the rpmfusion-free-updates-testing.repo, I could do:

BASH:~/-> sudo yum --enablerepo=rpmfusion-free-updates-testing list xbmc
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto
rpmfusion-free-updates-testing                                                                                       | 3.3 kB     00:00     
rpmfusion-free-updates-testing/primary_db                                                                            |  51 kB     00:00     
rpmfusion-free-updates-testing/group_gz                                                                              | 1.6 kB     00:00     
Available Packages
xbmc.x86_64                                            10.1-7.fc16                                            rpmfusion-free-updates-testing

Ah, sure enough, there is a newer version sitting there, though it is just a minor "release" upgrade. I don't know how that version compares to the latest source code version, I haven't checked.

---------- Post added at 01:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:38 PM ----------

OK, I checked on the xbmc website. 10.1 "Dharma" is current stable, 11.0 "Eden" is beta1.
If you're expecting a xbmc-11.0-beta1.fc16.arch.rpm to be any more "stable" than the source code it would be built from, you're expecting an awful lot. It's called "beta" for a reason. If you want to be a beta tester for xbmc, then file your bug reports.

[mfaine]

Thanks, this is what I was looking for, more or less, still it doesn't seem that just anyone can have their own private but publicly available repository like in Ubuntu. Is that correct? I'll give this as try but as you mentioned it is still 10.x version. Eden (source) is a beta version of the 11.0 XBMC.

It works okay but the binary version I have on this laptop (Windows) works much better, it sometimes locks up, requiring a force kill but has not yet crashed. I was hoping a pre-built Linux version would also be better, perhaps they know how to build it better than I do.

The HTPC is Fedora 16 on ION with a very up-to-date system but still the builds are not quite as high a quality - may have something to do with their emphasis on building on Ubuntu.

[PabloTwo]

There are several psuedo-private but public repos supporting Fedora. Check out this link for a sampling. Yes, it's often the case that someone building rpm packages for Fedora, using their own expertise and knowledge, can "improve" upon a stock compile/install to fix or work-around issues.

[mfaine]

thanks, didn't know about that. I'll have to check those out.