[RFC] New Community Initiative - GitOps for Fedora Packaging

[bookwar (Aleksandra Fedorova)]

@mattia

Yes, a system like Bodhi is a pain to maintain and increases burden on an already thin layer of infrastructure maintainers. But having a purposed webUI, or CLI, for users / packagers to handle their update is much more easy than having to deal with a git based operated system.

• Submitting an update now involves a user friendly webUI, or some commands from CLI. With a git based operation, that would mean to fork the main repo, edit some files, push a commit to the fork, create a pull request…
• Giving feedback to an update (what is now called karma) would mean, I presume, to remember some obscure keyword to be posted as comment to the PR, instead of a simple click in the webUI or a command from CLI
• Update info is nicely showed in Bodhi webUI, I don’t think the same readability would be obtainable in a git PR/commit

Other than that, Bodhi does a lot more than being an interface to post an update. Think at bodhi composer, getting rid of bodhi would mean develop yet another tool to manage composes. It also bring useful and easy to read searches and reports of updates by release.

IMO, switching all this to a git based solution, provided that would be possible, would bring significant hurdle to packagers and would move away testers from submit feedback.

0. This is a good feedback, thank you for writing it.

1. I think that we need CLI tools, no matter the way backend and interface are implemented. So the GitOps approach does not mean that we should get rid of fedpkg. The WebUI part may or may not be needed, but I would prefer it to be stateless and optional.

2. I do not quite understand your point about karma. How is karma in Bodhi different from comments on Merge Requests in Git Forge? Why do you think karma comments need special treatment?

3. When you say “updates are listed nicely” is there something specific in Bodhi listings which you like?

I am looking at Fedora Updates System and to me it does not look very different from a generic list of MRs like Merge requests · CentOS / Integration SIG / compose-tests · GitLab

And the update page FEDORA-2025-1cd2d082ff — unspecified update for ostree — Fedora Updates System looks relatively similar to Rebase to 3.11.9 (!22) · Merge requests · Red Hat / centos-stream / rpms / python3.11 · GitLab

There are comments, labels, test results, changelog, reviewers..

Except that on the Bodhi page I don’t immediately see whether update has been merged or not. Afaik it is controlled by the “testing” label, but it is not obvious.

Are there specific features which make it nice?