EPEL Testing

The Bodhi system is used to track and collate feedback on testing updates. All testing updates will be shown in the Bodhi system. First of all, if any test update package works worse for you in any respect than the pre-update version did, this is a problem that should be communicated to the developers. Secondly, when you click on a certain update, you will see a screen with more information on the update. The Details section should give you information on what the update is intended to fix. You should, if possible, test that the update does indeed fix the issues it claims to fix.

You can give your feedback on a test update by using the Bodhi web interface. There is a Login link in the left-hand sidebar. Log in using your Fedora account. If you don’t have a Fedora account, you can create an account here. Once you are logged in, you will be able to leave a comment on the update. Underneath the comment box are three options: Untested, Works for me, and Does not work. For a guide on when to leave each type of feedback, read the QA:Update_feedback_guidelines[update feedback guidelines].

Each Works for me adds 1 to the test update’s karma, while each Does not work subtracts 1 from it. Untested leaves the karma unchanged. Usually, test updates with karma of 3 are automatically sent out as full official updates, while test updates with karma of -3 are automatically withdrawn from the testing repository. As you can see, your testing and feedback is vital to make sure that good updates are released quickly and bad ones don’t get out to the general public.

If you use the DNF tool rather than yum, note that unlike yum, it does not notify you of dependency errors in the set of available updates by default. yum will, by default, print some information about the dependency errors, and then fail the update: you have to run to install all the updates that do not have dependency errors. DNF essentially does by default, and silently - it will install all updates that do not have dependency errors, and not tell you about those that do.

To use dnf to spot updates with dependency errors, you can run , which should act like yum’s default behaviour.

If you’d rather not enable the epel-testing repository permanently but just use it on a case-by-case basis, you can do this with dnf. The command:

will update the entire system using packages from the epel-testing repository, while the command:

will install or update only the package named from the epel-testing repository.