Are you already familiar with the basic concepts of the specfile library? Then welcome to a collection of some slightly more advanced topics that you could find useful. If you're not that familiar and would like to start with something easier, you can take a look at Introduction to specfile library.
We are reaching the end of the year and it’s a good time to look back at the Packit highlights of this year. And it was a year!
We didn’t take a winter sleep, and at the very start of the year, we announced the Python library for parsing specfiles. (Mainly written by Nikola.) We had been successfully using it for some time and it was time to give the benefit to others. Thanks to that, there is now a language Server for RPM spec files.
A lot usually happens in Brussels at the turn of January and February. And this time, we were present as well for the first time. František (joined by Evgeny) presented on CentOS Connect how Packit and Testing Farm can be beneficial to the CentOS community. Also, at this conference, there was a meetup of the CentOS Integration SIG which Matej and František joined. The main event in Brussels is the FOSDEM conference, a big conference consisting of multiple so-called rooms. František took an interactive session in the Distribution room about the relationship between upstream and downstream.
During the whole year, we have made many improvements so more packages can use Packit’s Fedora release automation. Since many packages can benefit from Packit right away, we’ve introduced an onboarding command capable of preparing a configuration file and also moving it to dist-git – either via pull requests or direct push.
For some time, Packit has been able to build VM images thanks to the prototype integration with the Image Builder service. To promote this functionality and see if there is enough demand to continue development, Maja prepared a blog post for RedHat’s Developer Portal (also available on Packit’s webpage).
As each year, the team met in person in June in Brno – both to gather and discuss Packit-related topics and also to be part of DevConf.CZ conference. To not need to dive into everything happening during that time in this text, take a look at our blog post. We organised a successful workshop in the Red Hat Brno office and took multiple talks, notably a showcase of user success stories presented by our fellow users.
During summer and again after a couple of years, we had the pleasure to have a student working on a Packit-related task as part of the Google Summer of Code. This time, the functionality was going outside of the Fedora ecosystem, namely to support OBS (the openSUSE build and distribution service). We want to thank Brian Elle who worked on this, and Dan Čermák who took the lead on this from the openSUSE side and is currently polishing the code so it can be introduced into Packit’s codebase without worrying about maintainability.
Another regular event during the year is a Fedora yearly conference – Flock. This time happening in Rochester and thanks to Fedora’s sponsorship, both Laura and František could take part. Similar to DevConf.CZ we’ve covered all the details in a separate blog post. Just to mention the talks presented, we took one session covering Fedora automation and our journey to it and a second one with Jan Havlín from the Testing Farm to show people various testing use cases and all the news that was delivered on this field.
The second half of the year was spent finishing all the initiatives we’d worked on for some time. The long-awaited feature was not to require a git upstream for Fedora release automation. This wasn’t so simple because of the old decision to build Packit on the concept of related git repositories – one representing upstream and one downstream. (And maybe one for the source-git, but that’s a story for another time.) Luckily, all the hard work was done and many packages can now use Packit.
Another feature and another change of Packit’s internal plumbings is the way to avoid having divergent branching when releasing to multiple Fedora (or EPEL) branches. Thanks to this, the commits between branches can now be shared and the history can be linear.
This is still not all. Another huge feature spreading across multiple packages is the support for side-tags. It’s a vast improvement and enabler for various package groups that need to control many packages together. And it’s finally there!
And this is still not all for this year. We love collaborating on features and one such collaboration was/is with Siteshwar Vashisht on integrating Packit with OpenScanHub so Packit users can run static analysis without much effort. Later during the year, we managed to properly report differential scans (so you can check only new findings.) If you are interested in this (or would like to know why one needs to care), look at Situ’s presentation on DevConf.CZ or Cauldron conference. You can also visit Brussels next year and František and Siteshwar Vashisht should present the integration on the CentOS Connect. Feedback for this functionality is welcome here.
After all these big achievements and many small and big improvements, the time has come to release Packit v1.0.0. Everything is now prepared, and we are giving people time to update their configuration files. (Since we love automation and pull request-based workflows, the affected users should have received a pull request with the changes required.)
So, quite a strong year, wasn’t it?
If you rather want to check some hard data, let’s look at the usage trend charts from last year. We’ve managed to double the number of projects! As you can see, there is a strong trend in the Fedora automation space overnumbering the projects with upstream Copr builds and/or tests.
And now, we are slowly moving towards the next year. So, what you can expect from us?
We have two ideas on how to have a bigger impact (a positive one, we truly believe) in Fedora. Since we believe Fedora is about community, we have prepared two Fedora Change Proposals so everyone can provide feedback on what we would like to introduce.
We would also like to give our dashboard more love. We used to prioritise other features, but we can’t postpone it forever. With the help of Freya, we plan to start with user research and try to make the dashboard more user-friendly as part of Project Mycorrhiza.
To be closer to Fedora, we would also like to move our deployments to the Fedora OpenShift Cluster. The discussions are ongoing, and luckily, we might be able to do this soon.
And if you want to meet us in person, a good chance is CentOS Connect, DevConf.CZ or Flock.
Hopefully, the following year will be at least as successful as the previous one. Thanks everyone for your support. We have the pleasure to have a friendly and grateful userbase that is a pleasure to work with and for. All the best for the new year!
After 105 minor releases we are almost ready to announce our first major release, Packit 1.0.0!
This term has been thrown around a bit in issues here and there relating to the dashboard and people usually get confused, and rightfully so! Lets dive in and see what Project Mycorrhiza is and why we chose this name.
Photo by Malene Thyssen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Were you annoyed by Packit creating divergent branches in your package's dist-git repository? You'll be happy to know that Packit now supports a new dist_git_branches syntax that enables fast-forwarding commits between branches.
We are happy to announce that support for non-git upstreams in the pull_from_upstream job is here!
This enhancement simplifies configuration by removing the need to define upstream_project_url,
opening the door for more use cases, while also simplifying the onboarding in general.
It’s been a month since two Packit members (Laura and František) attended Flock, the annual Fedora conference, in Rochester. Let’s see some highlights from our journey There and Back Again. Sadly the travel there wasn’t as expected at all, but luckily the tornadoes did not stop us and we both made it to Rochester.
We are excited to announce a new experimental feature in our service: the integration of Static Application Security Testing (SAST) using OpenScanHub.
OpenScanHub is a service that runs various static analyzers on RPM packages - by default Cppcheck,
ShellCheck and the static analyzers embedded in GCC.
Let's have a look at the details of the prototype!
Last month, we had the pleasure of engaging with a dynamic audience during our interactive talk on changelogs at the DevConf in Brno, Czech Republic. In case you missed it, you can watch the recording here. Throughout the session, we explored various aspects of changelog usage, including their content, format, and the potential for automation. By asking a series of questions to the attendees, we gathered insights and opinions that highlighted both common practices and divergent viewpoints within the community. In this follow-up article, we aim to summarise the key findings from our discussion, analyse the trends and preferences that emerged, and offer our reflections on the role of changelogs in software development.
The first part of June is usually quite busy for our team. Why? The last couple of years, this has been a time of DevConf.CZ conference. (The unpredictable January had been changed into a more pleasant June.) Even though the conference itself is important, it’s used as an opportunity for various people from around the globe to come to Brno and thanks to that, a lot is happening also during the days around. For the Packit team, it’s a nice opportunity to have the whole team together in one place – we can do some fun teambuilding (like canoeing this year) but also discuss any technical topics or meet our users and realise how are the real people behind all the nicknames. This time we also prepared something for them:
