Thanks for bringing some attention to this, Ben. I don't do a whole lot of packaging,
but I admit there are some places where the workflow could be improved. I'd be willing
to join the group and help where I can.
Some notes off the top of my head that I ran into recently:
- fedpkg hides quite a few tools underneath, and it's not always clear which tool is
running. This becomes a nuisance when a tool requests a password, since quite often you
just get a "Password: " prompt. I think bodhi does exactly that, and every time
it does I scratch my head trying to remember if I should provide the GPG passphrase, FAS
account password, or something else.
- Related to the previous one, error messages could be improved. Recently I had to renew
my Pagure token so I could request a new repo. I renewed my token, found the config file,
updated it... and nothing changed. Turned out it was the wrong config file - old, legacy
location maybe? Don't know. My point is, it'd be helpful if every error that says
something like "value X in config is wrong" would also specify which config file
it's talking about.
- fedpkg clone performs the clone over ssh, instead of HTTPS, so if you're not logged
into your FAS account, you get an "access denied" error, which is as amusing as
it's irritating, given that the package repos are public.
- Now that I've mentioned it, maybe we should add something like "fedpkg
fas-login"? Personally I've put "alias koji-init='kinit
my-FAS-account(a)my-domain.org'" in my .bashrc, because looking up how to solve the
"koji says I'm unauthenticated" error got boring after the third time.
Cheers,
A.I.