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Packit

Packit is a tool which helps you integrate your upstream project into Fedora ecosystem.

Packit stands for multiple things:

  • Packaging automation: get latest bits into Fedora rawhide with the least amount of manual steps
  • Upstream integration: let upstream know how their project stands in Fedora
  • Source-git
  • Reusing existing services: we don't want to reinvent the wheel: we'll use existing tools and integrate with present services and only write new code if we need to
  • Be opt-in: you don't need to use it and you can opt out any time you want

Update workflows

Igor Gnatenko wrote a very nice comment about this.

There are multiple distinct update scenarios which take place now for Fedora packages. Let's introduce them.

I am an upstream and downstream developer

This means that you care about Fedora a lot. Especially during development: you want to be sure that your project works well in Fedora.

It's also possible that you have a spec file in the upstream repo. And if you don't, you should consider adding it. That's how you can check that your project still has the correct RPM packaging.

This is the workflow which packit is trying to cover.

Upstream doesn't care about downstream

Sadly, this might be the case for most of the packages. Hence we need to maintain the spec file downstream.

This is where we think source-git will help.

rpm-bumspec is just enough

There is a bunch of packages where performing an update to latest upstream release is composed of updating version, release and a new changelog entry. This is in scope of release-monitoring.org.

We can generate the spec file

We already have a bunch of spec file generators that we use in Fedora: pyp2rpm, rust2rpm, gem2rpm, npm2rpm...

We can use them to perform the update: regenerate the spec file for the new upstream release.

Right now this is out of scope for packit.


FAQ

Spec files in upstream repos? Are you out of your mind?

This indeed doesn't make sense for plenty of projects. But if upstream and downstream are the same people, then why ask them to maintain one file in multiple places? Why not just use automation to sync the file across multiple places?

What about the-new-hotness?

We are in touch and aware of the plans.

We feel like the-new-hotness is trying to cover workflow 3) while packit aims for 1) and 2).

Are you trying to take away my package(s) from me?

No.

You are still the maintainer of your package and you are responsible for the spec file content. We are just trying to automate the tedious tasks.

Will you push to dist-git directly?

No. We will open pull requests and maintainers will be responsible for merging them.

Will the bot be able to merge those pull requests?

Short-term: no.

Long-term: a good topic for a discussion. It's really up to Fedora project to allow such a policy.

What about Fedora changes related to packaging and mass updates?

Good question. We thought about this, but haven't reached any conclusions yet. Please, suggest.

Can I become an early adopter?

Yes, please! We have a list of candidates for early adoption in the readme at the moment. Please, open a pull request and add yourself to the list.

How can I watch your progress?

The best thing to do is to watch our upstream repo. In future we are planning to write blog posts for the new features.