Why PkgDB Is Being Decommissioned
In general, PkgDB works well for the current workflow of a package’s lifecycle. Currently, a package has several branches that are tied to Fedora releases such as “f24” or “f25”. These branches have implied service level agreements (SLAs) and end of life (EOL) dates based on the Fedora release itself. Although the implied SLAs and EOLs in these branches have worked well for Fedora in the past, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to juggle different application lifecycles and their dependencies’ lifecycles under the umbrella of these limited number of SLAs and EOLs, especially when trying to keep up with upstream. In the past, we have not been able to have different package lifecycles within a Fedora release due to the nature of it's design. With Modularity, that will become a reality, and Fedora packagers and module maintainers will need a new way of branching in dist-git to enable this functionality.
Since PkgDB was written with the old way of branching in mind, there ended up being two logical paths forward. We could significantly rewrite PkgDB to work with the new branching methodology, or we could migrate PkgDB's existing functionality to other tooling. After talking with some folks in the Fedora community, the latter seemed to be the right approach because Fedora was moving to "Pagure over Dist-Git", and that was going to duplicate and clash with a lot of PkgDB's functionality anyways.
How Is PkgDB's Functionality Being Replaced?
PkgDB has two primary functions. It provides package ACLs, and package related ticketing. After PkgDB will be replaced, ACLs will be handled in Pagure over Dist-Git (placeholder link) at the package level like you would handle a traditional code repository on pagure.io. As for ticketing, that will be replaced by a CLI tool called fedrepo-req that will submit JSON formatted tickets on your behalf to a ticket queue in a specific Pagure project monitored by the Fedora Release Engineering group.
For more information or information on how other features in PkgDB are being replaced, please read the "How To Make This Change" section of the Arbitrary Branching Focus Document written by the Factory 2.0 team.
How do I give a user commit access to a project?
- Browse to your project on Pagure over Dist-Git (placeholder link)
- Click on "Settings"
- Scroll down to "Users and Groups"
- Click on "add user"
- Type the username in the form
- Select "commit" instead of the default of "ticket" to set the level of access
- Click "Add"