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Customizing 'source-git update-dist-git'

Starting question: How do we transform an upstream repository to dist-git? What are the steps that are required, and what actions or transformations happen along the way?

In the flowchart above the transformation process includes building and then unpacking an SRPM. This step serves as a (partial) validation of the integrity of the content to be committed to dist-git, and it is inspired from the Kernel source-git workflow.

In order to build an SRPM 3 things need to be configurable:

  1. How the source archive is created.
  2. How patches are produced from the Git-history.
  3. The way the spec-file is generated or updated.

Packit already has actions for all three of these, and all these actions run as part of packit srpm. To make the three aspects above configurable, source-git update-dist-git could be updated to run packit srpm under the hood, and use the unpacked SRPM to update dist-git.

The functionality provided by files_to_sync wouldn't be changed: additionally to unpacking the SRPM to dist-git, update-dist-git should also consider syncing the content specified by files_to_sync.

Besides this the following improvements could be made:

Improvements to 'create-archive'​

Currently create-archive takes a command or a list of commands which are executed in a non-shell environment. There is also the top-level sources key, which has a similar role to create-archive, but instead of running some commands, it will download and save the archive.

These two could be merged, by allowing create-archive to also be a dictionary, and introducing two new configuration sub-keys: download and script.

create-archive.script would take a single or multi-line string and run it as a bash script. This behavior is similar how multi-line scripts are handled in GitHub or GitLab workflows.

create-archive.download would be synonymous to sources.

Examples:

actions:
  create-archive:
    download:
      - url: https://my_website.com/
        path: name
actions:
  create-archive:
    script: |
      rm *.tar.gz
      make archive

Improvements to 'create-patches'​

create-patches currently expects a command or a list of commands. The script subkey could be introduced here, too, in order to make the configuration syntax similar to create-archive. Other subkeys could be introduced later on, to provide some pre-defined (but still configurable) ways to generate patches.

Currently there is no mechanism to pass the patches produced by this action to fix-spec-file.

Improvements to 'fix-spec-file'​

fix-spec-file currently expects a command or a list of commands. Similarly to the previous two changes, script could be introduced, to be consistent with the other three.

Stories proposed​

  • Introduce a script key for all actions. This key would be a single or multi-line string which is going to be executed as a bash script. (packit/packit#1641)
  • Introduce create-archive.download to be a synonym for sources. Mark sources as deprecated. (packit/packit#1642)
  • Update source-git update-dist-git to use packit srpm under the hood, unpacking the SRPM to dist-git. (packit/packit#1643)
  • Provide patches produced by create-patches for fix-spec-file. (packit/packit#1644)