I'm encountered a situation where doing fedpkg verrel on a master branch lead to the wrong outcome.

If I understood correctly the code, the way the release is retrieved is by either asking directly koji for the rawhide target or by using the git remote branches.

Currently in staging, building in master will results in build with the .fc32 dist-tag as it should. However, we created the branches in pdc but did not create them in git.
So if you clone a random package in stage dist-git and run fedpkg verrel on it, you'll get the wrong result:

$ fedpkg-stage clone python-arrow
$ cd python-arrow
$ fedpkg-stage verrel
python-arrow-0.12.1-25.fc30

Looks like this one doesn't even have the f31 branch, so the dist-tag get to be .fc30. If you create the f30 or f31 branch and push it (which will be allowed since they exists in PDC), the dist-tag will change (to either .fc31 or .fc32 depending on which one is created).

I'm wondering if we do not want to fix this by simply always asking koji rather than trying to guess from remote git branches.

The fix could be as simple as removing in https://pagure.io/fedpkg/blob/1646419e6b3f84914ea91587d5b2c74b44456463/f/fedpkg/__init__.py#_219 the line 219 to 234 and one level of indentation for the lines 235 to 243.

Thoughts?