"MS" == Michal Sekletar msekleta@redhat.com writes:
MS> Recently, internally they introduced very nice feature that might be MS> also useful to Fedora packagers. It is the ability to build packages MS> from exploded sources. Packager no longer uploads tarball to MS> lookaside cache and maintains patches in dist-git, but points rhpkg MS> (internal equivalent of fedpkg) to git repo that contains exploded MS> sources with downstream patches applied on top. This allows for easy MS> cherry-picking of patches between branches and a ton of other nice MS> features that make maintainer's life easier.
I know this is the infra list, but as a packaging committee member I figured I'd comment.
From a packaging standpoint I'd be happy to see something like this allowed in Fedora, with some caveats (which I'm coming up with on the fly, so don't hate on me if they're dumb):
1) Probably only if the upstream development model works this way. If upstream expects people to work from tarballs, it's probably better to work that way too. Maybe not, though; I don't really have enough info.
2) The builds must obviously be repeatable using just the srpm.
3) The tooling must make it very simple to duplicate the exploded tree in which you develop using just the spec, patches, and a checkout from upstream.
Also, it would be nice to see how the workflow goes and how it differs from the way you work with stacked patch applications and "%autosetup -S git". I'm sure even a simple doc would be enough to sell this.
- J<