On Tue, 2013-05-28 at 09:45 -0400, Ralph Bean wrote:
The packager workflow is pretty tedious. There has been some improvement to it, but more can be done. Things like fedora-review and fedora-create-review (and bodhi!) are a huge help. But there are plenty of inefficient "blocking" points in the process.
For instance, once a new package is approved, only then does the submitter declare what branches they want with an scm admin request. They then wait for an scm admin to declare that they have created their branches, and then wait for a cronjob to run that gives them permission to push on those branches (manually). They then wait for their koji builds to finish to (manually) submit bodhi updates.
It would be nice if we could automate that whole process -- once a package is approved, if there were a "make-it-so" button that required no further intervention from the packager (but still required the keen eye of an scm admin).
There are further sequences down the pipeline like requesting that packages in testing be pushed to stable, but there are good arguments against automating that.
I've had the idea of having a service dedicated to package review for a while. It could be backed up with git so that the changes from the review directly end up in the git repository, tracking the whole history of the package since it was proposed for review. Of course it would also ask the submitter which branch he would like to have on his package and eventually fedora-review could be triggered for each new review created giving early feedback.
Apparently, I was trying to make something concrete of this idea 18months ago: http://ambre.pingoured.fr/cgit/review_srv.git/ But, although I still find the idea interesting, I have not pushed it further.
Pierre