Consider building packages (not templates) for Fedora Rawhide and Debian Sid

[alimirjamali]

How to file a helpful issue

The problem you're addressing (if any)

During every transition from current stables to the testing releases, it takes some time and few challenges to get it right. Building packages for Rawhide and Sid will allow a find problems early, fix them early approach. Individual users do not have the infrastructure to build and test every package from source.

The solution you'd like

Qubes CI/CD facilities could build and test every package for Fedora Rawhide and Debian Sid. Building and unittests for them should be allowed to fail. Individuals and 3rd party developers could observe the failures and help fixing issues at the earliest stage.

The value to a user, and who that user might be

3rd party developers and power users who want to test packages at the earliest stages and help fixing issues.

Completion criteria checklist

(This section is for developer use only. Please do not modify it.)

[marmarek]

Regarding Debian, we already build packages for Debian testing, which is fitting the purpose you describe here.
As for Fedora rawhide, I'm not sure if that's a good idea, but I guess we can try. We usually start building Fedora packages for the upcoming template about the time it's branched from rawhide and when mass rebuild completes - this more or less ensures our packages are linked with the correct version of libraries in Fedora packages (but sometimes it happens that some major change still lands in Fedora after mass rebuild).

[alimirjamali]

Regarding Debian, we already build packages for Debian testing, which is fitting the purpose you describe here.

Debian testing goes to a deep freeze at some point to become eligible for next stable. During that period, new packages are allowed only for Debian Sid and Debian Experimental. So Debian testing is too slow.

Major considerations are the current load on CI/CD infrastructure (they are too slow recently IMO) as well as storage space required (also for mirrors). Bandwidth should be a lesser concern. User who want to experiment could do in-place upgrade of the current testing templates to Rawhide/Sid and switch to their repos.