Hello devel list,

this is a request for comments for a recent proposal I filed at releng
tracker:
https://pagure.io/releng/issue/7445

In short, package managers on Rawhide would no longer replace $releasever
variable with a numerical value (like '29' at this moment, soon '30'), but
with 'rawhide' string instead. I hope this change will make life a bit
easier for third-party repos maintainers, for users, for developers and
sysadmins, and for release engineering. The technical implementation can be
seen in the ticket (it's the 'Proposed solution 1'), together with a long
discussion.

To provide a longer explanation of the improvements I expect this to bring:
* Third-party repo maintainers will no longer need to provide two different
repo files, one for stable Fedora releases using $releasever in URLs, and
one for Rawhide hardcoding 'rawhide/' in URL and avoiding $releasever in
URL. (Technically, two repo files are not needed if you always use a
numbered dir even for Rawhide, but that's maintenance-heavy, because you
need to change the directory number precisely at Branching time). This
involves COPR as well.
* Users will be able to run commands like "dnf ... --releasever=28" even on
Rawhide. That doesn't work at the moment, because most repo files don't use
$releasever and instead have 'rawhide/' hardcoded.
* Developers and sysadmins will be able to use the same approach regarding
repositories for stable Fedora releases and Rawhide. Rawhide will no longer
be different, requiring special treatment. For example, the same repo URL
can be used to install a system, or the same URL can be used to add an
additional repository to an existing system. As an engineer working on
automation, I was always annoyed how I need to special-case Rawhide
everywhere (and of course, maintain a config file that states which release
number Rawhide currently maps to). That will hopefully be no longer
necessary, or very much reduced.
* Fedora release engineers should be able to get rid of
fedora-repos-rawhide (again, hardcoding 'rawhide/' in URL), and use the
standard repo files instead (making use of $releasever).

There might be other advantages, which I haven't tested or though of.

There are also disadvantages. The only one I know of at this moment, is
that PackageKit is currently incompatible with this change (it uses custom
logic for populating $releasever, different from dnf logic) and will need
adjustments.

Fedora releng has pre-approved this change in the ticket, and the point of
this email is to ask for more feedback from all of you. I'd appreciate if
you could help us identify edge cases we haven't thought of, or point out
which tools would be incompatible with this change, so that we can track
them and discuss it with their developers.

Thanks,
Kamil
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