SIGs/Source-git

Rules

• Whatever we produce here, it MUST NOT violate Fedora Packaging Guidelines (we should strive to change them if needed).
• Proven packagers and rel-eng still needs to be able to do their work in dist-git: their workflows MUST NOT be dirupted.
• Maintainers HAVE TO be able to step in for automation and replace some of its actions if needed. The automation NEEDS TO handle such situation.

Goals

Our main goal is build a Minimal Viable Product during the Fedora 35 development cycle.

MVP

• Source git repos can be easily created, set up and this is well-documented.

• The workflow is defined well and it's clear where the repositories are hosted.

• Source-git content is synchronized into dist-git via dist-git pull requests.

• Specfile changes are synchronized back to the source-git repo from dist-git.

Benefits to Fedora

• Downstream patches are tracked as git commits. This way it's easier to backport or cherry-pick changes from the upstream and rebase the patches when a new upstream release happens.

• Patch files are handled by automation which makes the job of maintainers easier.

• It should be easier to onboard more maintainers in Fedora community since the workflow would be closer to the way the contributors work in the upstream project.

Meetings

1st meeting will happen in the week of April 19-22; please fill in your preferred day and time: https://whenisgood.net/bsyhsqq

The meeting will be announced by Fri April 16th and will take place on freenode IRC, the channel to be specified.

1st meeting agenda

• Agree on communication channels

• Define how work is going to be tracked

• Upstream source code and history can contain code which is patented or has legal impact on Fedora project.

Follow-up work

Once the MVP is implemented, we can start building more automated workflow on top of the MVP.

Workflow

1. Set up a source-git repository manually on a packit-supported platform (github.com, gitlab.com)
   • This includes creating a specific branch and setting up jobs for packit-service to handle events.
   • CI can (and should) be set up (such as Testing Farm).
2. Anyone in the community is able to interact with this repository the same way with any other open-source project.
3. Packit-service can accept events when a new upstream release is done (via Upstream Release Monitoring).
4. Packit-service creates a pull request which contains changes to bring the new release to Rawhide.
   • A dist-git PR is created in parallel. Downstream checks are synchronized to the source-git PR.
5. The owner of the source-git repository reviews and updates the pull request as needed.
6. Once approved, dist-git PR is merged first and packit-service triggers a build in Rawhide. If the build passes, source-git PR is merged as well. If the build fails, source-git PR is updated a new dist-git PR is created and doing the cycle of this step again.

Members

• Tomáš Tomeček
• Hunor Csomortáni
• František Lachman
• Jiri Popelka
• Stephen Coady
• Don Zickus (representing [Always Ready Kernel])

Status

The SIG is now announced on the devel list: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/ITHR2QMNH3NXICI56JNBSVXWLKREXCN6/

We are looking for early adopters of the workflow and members to give us feedback during the development.

Communication

TBD - will be defined during our first meeting.

In the meantime you can reach out to the team on #packit at Freenode IRC.

Important links

• Source-git