Pack It!

This project provides tooling and automation to integrate upstream open source projects into Fedora operating system.

What and why?

• Our intent is to bring downstream and upstream communities closer: provide feedback from downstream to upstream. (e.g. "Hello \<upstream project Y>, your newest release doesn't work in Fedora rawhide, it breaks \<Z>, here is a link to logs.")

• We want to only merge, build and compose components which integrate well with the rest of the operating system. The biggest impact of such behavior will be on Fedora rawhide and when working on a new release.

• Automatically pull and validate new upstream releases. This can be a trivial thing to do, why should maintainers waste their times on work which can be automated.

• Developing in dist-git is cumbersome. Editing patch files and moving tarballs around is not fun. Why not working with the source code itself? With source git, you'll have an upstream repository and the dist-git content stuffed in a dedicated directory.

• Let's use modern development techniques such as pull requests, code review, modern git forges, automation and continuous integration. We have computers to do all the mundane tasks. Why we, as humans, should do such work?

• We want dist-git to be "a database of content in a release" rather a place to do actual work. On the other hand, you'll still be able to interact with dist-git the same way. We are not taking that away. Source git is meant to be the modern, better alternative.

DevConf.cz "Auto-maintain your package" talk.

Ehm, what's source-git?

Content of source-git repository is equivalent to dist-git, but uses upstream format: source files instead of tarballs, git commits instead of patches.

You can host this repository, or the specific git branch, anywhere you want. If you open a pull request, you will receive feedback on the changes: Does the package build with the changes? Do all the package tests pass? How about tests of the dependant packages? Are the changes good to be included in Fedora?

The goal of packit is to provide automation and tooling to interact with source-git repositories so you don't have to touch dist-git ever again. Our plan is to center development experience around upstream repositories and source-git.

Upstream repositories and source-git repositories are pretty much the same thing. Creating source-git only makes sense when the upstream does not accept downstream spec file or adding spec file to such a project doesn't make sense.

For more info on source-git, please read the detailed design doc.

Plan and current status

Work has begun on the MVP.

• [x] E2E workflow for getting upstream releases into Fedora
• [x] Bring new upstream releases into Fedora rawhide as dist-git pull requests. (propose-update command included in in 0.1.0 release)
• [ ] Build the change once it's merged.
• [ ] Send new downstream changes back to upstream. (so the spec files are in sync)
• [ ] Packit can create bodhi updates.
• [x] Ability to propose updates also to stable releases of Fedora.
• [ ] Build RPMs in COPR and integrate the results into Github.
• [ ] source-git
• [ ] Packit can create a SRPM from a source-git repo.
• [ ] You can release to rawhide from source-git using packit.
• [ ] Packit can create a source-git repository.
• [ ] Packit helps developers with their source-git repositories.
• [ ] Packit as a service
• [ ] Packit reacts to Github webhooks.
• [ ] Have a github app for packit.
• [ ] Deployment.

Workflows covered by packit

• Update to latest upstream release in rawhide. For more info please read the documentation

Configuration

Configuration file for packit is described in a separate document: docs/configuration.md.

TL;DR

specfile_path: packit.spec
synced_files:
  - packit.spec
upstream_name: packit
package_name: packit
dist_git_url: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/packit.git

Requirements

Packit is written in python 3 and is supported only on 3.6 and later.

When packit interacts with dist-git, it uses fedpkg, we suggest installing it:

sudo dnf install -y fedpkg

Installation

On Fedora:

$ dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing packit

Or

$ pip3 install --user packitos

(packit project on PyPI is NOT this packit project)

You can also install packit from master branch, if you are brave enough:

$ pip3 install --user git+https://github.com/packit-service/packit.git

Candidates for early adoption

Please, open a PR if you want to be on the list, or just let us know.

• Identity team (@pvoborni)
• Plumbers & shells (@msekletar @lnykryn @siteshwar)
• pykickstart (@dcantrell @larskarlitski)
• python-operator-courier (Ralph Bean)
• @thrix
• youtube-dl (Till Mass)
• anaconda (@jkonecny12)
• greenboot (@LorbusChris)
• rebase-helper (@nforro)
• ABRT

Resources

• An excellent document by Colin Walters which describes a modern way of developing a distribution:
• https://github.com/projectatomic/rpmdistro-gitoverlay/blob/master/doc/reworking-fedora-releng.md