fedora-release workflow issues
Hi,
fedora-release recently moved to accept PRs under
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/fedora-release.
This is a big improvement. Nevertheless, the workflow still seems somewhat
rough.
Some ways in which could make the process simpler:
1. Drop Sign-off-by requirements. For fedora packages it is completely
pointless, since all contributors have signed the Fedora CLA. S-o-b is
used in some specific communities like kernel, and the requirement is
surprising for many people from other areas. It is not required for
other packages, and should not be required here.
2. Stop dropping the %changelog after branching. This made sense when
fedora-release was about fedora releases. But since the more important
function now is holding systemd presets, history *is* important.
It also makes rebasing patches between branches confusing.
3. Between the time that a PR is filed and it is merged, it is
possible for branching to occur. Fedora-release maintainers should
either go through all outstanding PRs *before* branching, or manually
cherry-pick the commit to the other branch. It's very easy for PR
submitter to miss that the change was not applied to both branches.
In general, I'd expect f-r maintainers to apply common sense and
cherry-pick all changes to other branches if appropriate.
4. Introduce a workflow for PRs where there's less chance of patch conflict.
Right now, essentially for any two PRs that touch the changelog and
are open at the same time this must occur. Rebasing is annoying
because rpm required entries to be in time order. Rebasing is also
complicated by 2. above.
In principle, the same problem is true for any package, but f-r is
special in the regard that we expect much more PRs for it.
The solution I like is to ask contributors to stop updating the
%changelog or bumping Release in patches that update presets, but
instead just make the commit title a good changelog entry. Then the
git log entries would be automatically inserted into the %changelog
right before the fedora-release release occurs, using a simple
script. (It's likely that this output would require some editing, but
it should be much less work overall for all the parties involved).
Zbyszek