Let’s talk about dist-git, as a place where we work. For us, packagers, it’s a well-known place. Yet for newcomers, it may take a while to learn all the details. Even though we operate with projects in a dist-git repository, the layout doesn’t resemble the respective upstream project.
There is a multitude of tasks we tend to perform in a dist-git repo: * Bumping a release field for sake of a rebuild. * Updating to the latest upstream release. * Resolving CVEs. * Fixing bugs by… * Changing a spec file. * Pulling a commit from upstream. * Or even backporting a commit. * And more...
For some tasks, the workflow is just fine and pretty straightforward. But for the other, it’s very gruesome - the moment you need to touch patch files, the horror comes in. The fact that we operate with patch files, in a git repository, is just mind-boggling to me.
Luckily, we have tooling which supports the repository layout - `fedpkg prep`, `srpm` or `mockbuild` are such handy commands - you can easily inspect the source tree or make sure your local change builds.
Where am I getting with this?
Over the years there have been multiple tools created to improve the development experience: rdopkg [r], rpkg-util [ru], tito [t] and probably much much more (e.g. the way Fedora kernel developers work on kernel [k]).
In the packit project, we work in source-git repositories. These are pretty much upstream repositories combined with Fedora downstream packaging files. An example: I recently added a project called nyancat [n] to Fedora. I have worked [w] on packaging the project in the GitHub repo and then just pushed the changes to dist-git using packit tooling. These source-git repositories can live anywhere: we have support for GitHub right now and are working on supporting pagure.
Would there be an interest within the community, as opt-in, to have such source-git repositories created for respective dist-git repositories? The idea is that you would work in the source-git repo and then let packit handle synchronization with a respective dist-git repo. Our aim is to provide the contribution experience you have in GitHub when working on your packages. Dist-git would still be the authoritative source and a place where official builds are done - the source-git repo would work as a way to collaborate. We also don’t have plans right now to integrate packit into fedpkg.
The main reason I am sending this is to gather feedback from all of you whether there is an interest in such a workflow. We don’t have concrete plans for Fedora right now but based on your feedback we could.
[r] https://github.com/softwarefactory-project/rdopkg [ru] https://pagure.io/rpkg-util [t] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/tito [k] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedorapro... [n] https://github.com/TomasTomecek/nyancat [w] https://github.com/TomasTomecek/nyancat/pull/2
Cheers, Tomas