Build your current checkout locally

Once you are comfortable with your local changes, you can build them before pushing them out. Just make sure that all code changes are committed, otherwise Packit won't be able to create patch files out of them.

We are going to use Packit to achieve such a thing, so please make sure you have it installed locally.

The command to create source RPMs is called srpm and that's how you can create one:

$ packit srpm
SRPM: /home/tt/g/systemd/systemd-stable/systemd-247.1-2.g68d22b32.fc33.src.rpm

Our changes worked! We can try building them, either in our local environment using Packit - this implies that all build dependencies are installed:

$ packit build locally

...or in mock:

mock --rebuild -r fedora-rawhide-x86_64 ./systemd-247.1-2.g68d22b32.fc33.src.rpm

-r allows you to pick a chroot of your choice and these are exactly the same which you can specify for builds in your packit.yaml.

If the build is passing locally, it may be time to propose your changes to dist-git.

How Packit generates an SRPM from a source-git repo?

These are the steps:

1. Download archive specified in specfile's Source directive.
2. Create patch files from commits on top off upstream_ref where necessary.
3. Bump release in the spec file.
4. Generate new changelog entry in the spec file.
5. Run rpmbuild and set paths so that rpmbuild can find patches, spec files, archive and additional sources.