THE EPEL WIKI PAGES ARE NO LONGER USED AND ARE OUT OF DATE - SEE THE EPEL DOCS FOR UP TO DATE INFORMATION.
(These wiki pages are being kept for historical reference only.)
EPEL Quality Assurance
EPEL strives to produce bug free and stable packages. Testing and Quality assurance is vital to this effort.
Testing packages
Packages entering the EPEL collection MUST spend 2 weeks or until they reach +3 karma in the updates system before being promoted as a stable update. During this time they are in the epel-testing repository. Everyone is encouraged to install and test packages from this repository and provide feedback. The Bodhi web interface is one place to provide feedback. You can also use the 'fedora-easy-karma' package to quickly provide feedback on all the packages you have installed from the epel-testing repository.
Broken dependency reports
Running periodic reports to find and note broken dependencies is another great way to ensure quality packages. Broken dependencies should never appear in the stable repos.
Noting packages that appear in both EPEL and RHEL
EPEL strives to never ship packages that are already available in RHEL. Noting and removing packages that this is the case for is another great way to help out with improving EPEL. Note that over the lifecycle of a RHEL release, new packages are sometimes added, so an EPEL package may start off as allowed and then need to be later removed.