A little while ago, I blogged about the new package and new branch request processes.
These changes have been pushed to production yesterday.
What does this change for you, packager?
New package
If you already a packager, you know the current process to get packages into Fedora, you know that once your package has been approved on bugzilla, you have to file a SCM request.
With the new process, this step is no longer necessary. You can directly go to pkgdb and file the request there.
From there admins will review the package review on bugzilla and create the package in pkgdb (or refuse with an explanation).
New branch
If your package is already in Fedora, you can now directly request a new branch in pkgdb. Here there are multiple options
- You have approveacls on the package (thus you are a package admin) and the request is regarding a new Fedora branch: The branch will be created automatically
- You have approveacls on the package (thus you are a package admin) and the request is regarding a new EPEL branch: The request will be submitted to the pkgdb admins who will process it in their next run
- You do not have approveacls on the package, then your request will be marked as: `Pending`, this means that the admins of the package have one week to react. They can either approve your request and by setting it to Awaiting Review, or they can decline the request (for which they must specify a reason). After this one week (or sooner if the package admin set the request to Awaiting Review) the pkgdb admin will process the request like they do with the other.
Note: Even with this new workflow, requests are still manually reviewed, so the requests will not necessarily be processed faster (but if it is easier for the admins, they may run it more often!).
What does this change for you, admins?
Hopefully, the process will be much simpler for you. In short
- no need to log onto any system, you can do everything from your own machine and it should work out of the box
- much more automated testing (including checking if a package is present in RHEL and on which arch for EPEL requests)
- one tool to process the requests: pkgdb-admin distributed as part of packagedb-cli (aka: pkgdb-cli)
I hope this process makes sense to you and will make your life easier.
You are welcome to already use these processes, just let us know if you run into some problems, but for the time being both the old and the new processes are supported :-)
