Git for Copr

[Bohuslav Kabrda]

Hi all,
at last Env and Stacks WG meeting I've promised to talk to Mirek Suchy, Copr maintainer, about providing sort-of-dist-git (*), perhaps with a web interface, for Copr.
The result of the discussion from Mirek's side is, that he's ok with it as long as he doesn't have to do it, since he's fully occupied with Copr. Also, Copr should still provide the option to build packages as it does now, e.g. sort-of-dist-git should be just a frontend application (not part of Copr), not really something that would be tied directly into Copr.

However, few other people also joined the discussion and the responses to this idea were more like:
- Why do we want to do this? This seems to be like creating Koji from Copr. Copr should remain lightweight.
- Why would we need web interface? People don't need/want it.
- If we really need web interface, why don't we utilize fedorahosted.org?
- Why don't we just allow people to utilize any git (private git repo, git hosting like Github) and provide just tool that would allow users to do "copr build" and it would work automatically (actually it seems that Tito already knows how to do this [1]).

My opinion on this is:
- Utilizing git for tracking changes is important for example for the "fedora-ugly" idea, where we would like to easily track/view specfile history.
- Having a single central place for git repos and offering it to Fedora contributors to use would be a nice addition. Utilizing fedorahosted.org for this usecase might be nice and we could reuse what we already have (although personally I find fedorahosted user experience pretty clumsy).
- At the very least, we could extend the Tito Copr releaser to add some sort of meta-tag to specfile (someone mentioned that this should be possible) containing git url and hash. This way, we would be able to track the repo that srpm came from and the commit hash - again, this would improve the experience for potential contributors, who would be able to easily find where to send pull requests/patches.

Overall, I think this would improve Copr user experience and soften the sharp edges that might otherwise scare potential Fedora contributors. Also, having git repos would IMO significantly improve the possibilities of collaboration and tracking - compared to throwing bunch of srpms into Copr by hand.
I don't think that we necessarily need to provide the hosting for this, but we should definitely provide a howto guide that would describe how to _easily_ achieve this with e.g. Github/Bitbucket repos and so on. Again, we should show an easy way for potential contributors, who may enter Fedora by building in Copr.

Regards,
Slavek.


(*) By sort-of-dist-git, I mean a place for git repos that would hold specfiles/patches, etc., e.g. what Fedora's dist-git holds, but possibly without the lookaside cache... Details to be discussed.

[1] http://miroslav.suchy.cz/blog/archives/2013/12/29/how_to_build_in_copr/index.html