"How absurdly simple!" I cried.

"Quite so!" said he, a little nettled. "Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you."

• Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"

We have planned for a while to use Packit to generate packages on Copr on demand for our somewhat complicated Rust executable, stratisd. It looked like this was going to be challenging, and in a sense it was, but once the task was completed, it turned out to have been pretty straightforward.

In the upcoming months, we plan to migrate our service to a new cluster. However, this may affect propose_downstream and pull_from_upstream jobs due to the new firewall rules. The problematic aspects could be:

• commands you run in your actions during syncing the release involving interactions with external servers
• downloading your sources from various hosting services (crates.io, npm, gems, etc.)

To smoothen this transition, we kindly encourage you to enable one of these jobs on our already migrated staging instance. This recommendation is particularly important if you belong to one of the groups affected by the two previous points. This proactive step will help us identify and address any issues promptly.

Recently, we received multiple contributions from the Strimzi team, specifically Jakub Stejskal and David Kornel, for the functionality of manual triggering of jobs and other related improvements, mostly focusing on the testing UX. We are very happy about these and would like to showcase the results of their awesome contributions.

We are very happy to announce a major enhancement to Packit! We have now added support for monorepositories, enabling the integration of upstream repositories containing multiple downstream packages. If you have a repository in the monorepo format, Packit can now help you automate the integration to downstream distributions both from CLI and as a service.

We have recently made some fixes to the process of handling the Release field regarding the %autorelease macro, so let's take that opportunity to explain how it works.

pre-commit is a wonderful tool that saves you a lot of time by automatically checking your changes before you commit and/or push them out.

As you will see in the following paragraphs, the year 2022 was really fruitful for the Packit project. Without further ado, let’s take a look at what the Packit team accomplished last year!

In the previous year, we automated the Fedora downstream release process in Packit. The first step of the release process, propagating the upstream release to Fedora, is covered by the propose_downstream job. This job updates the sources in Fedora, the spec file, and other needed files and creates pull requests with the changes in the dist-git repository.

The downside of this job is that for its execution, users need to install Packit Service GitHub/GitLab app since this job reacts only to GitHub/GitLab release webhooks. However, the person who maintains the package in Fedora may not be the upstream maintainer and may not have admin access to the upstream GitHub/GitLab repository.

To cover this case, we came up with a new job called pull_from_upstream, which aims to update Fedora dist-git similarly to propose_downstream, but is configured directly in the dist-git repository. Let's now look at how to set it up and how it works.

Do you contribute to projects which depend on each other? Would you like to test changes spanning multiple repositories together before merging them to the main branch? Then look no further, Packit's new feature of the Testing Farm integration is what you are looking for!

As you may already know, for using Packit Service GitHub App we require our users to have a valid Fedora Account System account. We were verifying the newcomers until now manually, but in recent weeks, we have implemented an automated solution for it. Let's take a closer look at how it is done currently and what have we improved!