arc/docs/package-automation/index.rst

Package Automation
==================

Purpose
-------

Not all Fedora applications are published as RPMs or are not always up to date to their
latest code release, automating this workflow would fix that.

Other teams would benefit from this work, such as those that build application
containers or running integration tests based on RPM releases.

Resources
---------

- Packit: https://packit.dev
- Bodhi: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/docs/
- Packit Pagure support: https://github.com/packit/packit-service/issues/556

Investigation
-------------

The investigation was about testing several tools to accomplish this: Github actions,
Jenkins, Packit and Bodhi.

Packit does provide a great level of abstraction to both build and publish a package
update, integrating with Bodhi and Koji in the way.

Packit is also available in both Github and Gitlab as a CI application but not in Pagure
(there is an open issue in their repository for implementing it).

Here is the list of ideas/things we discussed/looked at:

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1

    the-ci-platform
    packit-triggers
    packit-and-pagure

Conclusions
-----------

Packit looks to be the path to take, specially because it can integrate with different
tools, such as COPR and Bodhi.

There is an open questions as how to deal with apps that are hosted in Pagure which are
described in the "Proposed Roadmap" section.

Proposed Roadmap
----------------

We propose the use of Packit CI Server, usually refered as Packit Service, because it
can integrate with both Koji, COPR and Bodhi - it also means that we don't need to
maintain our own CI service to use packit.

Packit CI is also available in Gitlab which means the migration to other SCMs will have
minimal impact on this work.

Github
------

- Enable/Install Packit Github app:
  https://packit.dev/docs/packit-service/#integrating-packit-as-a-service-into-your-project-or-organization-from-github-marketplace;
- Add a `.packit.yaml` file in each repository (can be done with `packit init`);
- Sample: https://github.com/fedora-infra/the-new-hotness/pull/432

Pagure
------

Pagure is not supported in Packit at the time of this writing.

There is an open issue on the Packit team side to enable this in Pagure:
https://github.com/packit/packit-service/issues/556.

This could be an opportunity for CPE to work with the Packit team to enable this in
pagure, but that will require development effort on our side.

We could split the initiative in two phases:

- Phase 1: enable Packit in apps hosted in Github;
- Phase 2: Support Packit in Pagure and enable apps in Pagure to use Packit.

Those do not depend on each other and could be worked in parallel but that would mean we
need to dedicated more engineers to the initiative.

Team
----

- A team of three engineers would be more than enough;
- One experienced engineer to lead the team.

Skills
------

Github Apps
~~~~~~~~~~~

- Git;
- YAML;
- Basic packit knowdlege;
- Basic build tools knowdlege (bodhi, koji, copr, etc);

Packit + Pagure
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- All of the previous section + Python knowledge.