#66 Better documentation for pull request workflow
Opened 2 years ago by oturpe. Modified 2 years ago

Using pull requests is the simplest way to get started with Fedora package maintenance.
It should be the first approach suggested for new contributors,
rather than the current method of suggesting aiming directly for sponsorship.

I think two things are needed here:

  1. Create better documentation about the pull request workflow.
    Currently, the only thing that exists is Package Maintenance Guide's section Using fedpkg anonymously.
  2. Rework Joining the Package Maintainers
    so that it recommends using that workflow for start.
    Probably the only needed mention of sponsorship on that page is linking to How to Get Sponsored into the Packager Group.

I may also be that some packager tools could be improved
so that making pull requests would be easier.


I may also be that some packager tools could be improved
so that making pull requests would be easier.

Submitting a pull request itself is quite simple, one can just do that from the web interface. The complicated/confusing part is actually getting your changes to pagure. Sure, one can edit spec files via the web interface, but if an addition happens to include a new file (a patch for example), then git becomes mandatory.

As someone who has done the workflow for pull requests as a non-group member, the first time I don't even remember how I managed to get the files to commit, and the second time, I had to ask on #fedora-devel. That time it took almost an hour to actually figure out how to commit my changes.

One thing I just noticed:
At least if you are a packager already and do fedpkg new-sources when preparing an update,
the new source is actually uploaded to the lookaside cache.
Most probably, non-packagers cannot do this, and have to resort to fedpkg new-sources --offline.
Not sure which one a packager should prefer:
Uploading beforehand saves some effort from the maintainer,
but on the other hand, it feels wrong that somebody with no privileges to sources
can still write to package's lookaside cache.

I'm quite sure that non-packagers cannot upload to the look-aside cache. We've had a number of folks struggle with this. So, package maintainers need to check in the sources themselves. I'm not aware of a way to work around this at the moment :(

In most cases, it should be as easy as:

spectool -g <spec>
fedpkg new-sources ...

but the maintainer needs to run them

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