[Fedora-packaging] Packages without a dist tag

[Kamil Paral]

> On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 03:48:10AM -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > To clarify what we're trying to do in Taskotron: We work with NVRs
> > quite a lot. Sometimes we need to know "which Fedora/EPEL version was
> > this NVR built for?". We figured we could parse the dist tag, which
> > is very efficient, but its presence needs to be guaranteed (if we
> > don't want to maintain a list of hardcoded exceptions and use some
> > different logic for those).
> 
> Sorry if this is a silly question, but for your use case, does it
> matter than the disttag says what it was built against, not what
> release it was shipped with? Because the dist tag only tells you the
> former, since we don't always rebuild everything.

That is a good question, and it seems we will sometimes need to know the first thing (build target) and sometimes the other thing (ship target). For the latter, we will need to query Koji, there seems to be no way around that. For the former, we would like to avoid the query if possible.

The existing use case for using the build target is that packages will be able to define rule whitelists for certain checks (rpmlint, abipkgdiff) and store them in distgit. In order to download the correct whitelist, we need to know which distgit branch to check out. And that corresponds to the build target of the package (you don't even need to ship the package in fxx-updates(-testing), we want to check it right after it is built in Koji).