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:

Have you ever wanted to bring your pull request changes in a cloud image easily? Curious about how easy it can be? With Packit, it can be just about commenting on your pull request with /packit vm-image-build.

With the above command, Packit automates all the manual steps needed to create an RPM package with your pull request changes and asks the Image Builder to install it inside a brand new cloud image. Let's have a look at the prerequisites for this.

Have you ever wanted to make changes in an RPM spec file programmatically? specfile library has been created for that very purpose. It is a pure Python library that allows you to conveniently edit different parts of a spec file while doing its best to keep the resulting changeset minimal (no unnecessary whitespace changes etc.).

"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!