[CentOS-devel] working around stacked updates

Tue Jun 24 22:59:33 UTC 2014
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

On 06/24/2014 11:39 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> I have no idea where the initial import comes from ... All I know is it
> comes from Red Hat.

I was going to blog about this and writeup a dedicated piece, I might
still do that if it helps clear the air a bit but in a nutshell :

- we created a directory and did a PoC by importing the rhel7beta and
rhel7rc code, this demostrated how the system was going to work and if
the system was going to work

- the RH release team have built their own tools around howto manage the
code and howto push changes, making only one request from ourside that
non fast-forward merges not be pushed into the git repos at /rpms/,
which makes sense ( ie. they are likely NOT pulling in our changes into
their systems ). I say 'their' to imply the RH release team systems, not
Red Hat.

- The git repos at git.centos.org are a source representation of the
sources they push, its not a working or devel source tree that will get
in-process developer commits, this tree gets content to match the
content pushed out via their release process.

- For us, in the centos project and the community at large, these repos
become the canonical upstream to target our builds from. And they will
host our developement and in process content.

>> One assumes RHT Release Engineering and others inside RHT have
>> commit rights on that tree ... the trick in understanding the
>> security model and ability to dis-aggregate who committed what
>> without history
> 
> Again,  I don't know.  It comes from Red Hat.  Someone else will need to
> comment on that.  From my perspective, this initial commit is just like
> a RHEL SRPM.  Something from Red Hat that I trust explicitly.

That is my understanding as well, and having walked the tree a couple of
times now, we are fairly confident that every import into the git tree's
is repackageable as srpm should that be the format of choice for
downstream consumption.

>> It was clearly not, as some have opined, a simply unroll of
>> SRPMs and import, as there are several packages with no spec
>> file present.  List in the file:
>>     https://github.com/herrold/tool-tips/blob/master/clefos/fixup-dist.sh
>> in the second 'HERE' document.  The first outlines spec files
>> needing dist tagfixup

Do you have an example of a git repo that does not have a SPEC file ? I
had an arbitary look at a few on that list, and they all seem fine to
me. Its possible to checkout c7; get_sources.sh; rpmbuild -bs ... -> srpm.

>> How does one obtain commits in the centos 'git' tree?  I
>> understand the model at Github, and am of course well willing
>> to receive pull requests

The best way to onramp there is to post git format-email patches to this
list and we can curate them as is, in the git repo if needed. That also
means that further mod's down the road can just be cherry picked from
the patch stack on updates.

- KB


-- 
Karanbir Singh
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