Re: [gentoo-dev] Deprecating repoman

[Zoltan Puskas]

I've been using both repoman _and_ pkgcheck becasue I was not sure which
one covers all the checks I need to make. In fact [Pull Requests
wiki](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:GitHub/Pull_requests) has a
big red warning box with the following message, and I quote:

"CI is not an excuse not to run repoman full, at least for the packages
being committed."

[Package maintainer's responsibilities
wiki](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Package_maintainer%27s_responsibilities)
says "When committing changes, repoman commit **or** pkgdev commit (from the
dev-util/pkgdev package) can be used.", emphasis mine.

I use documentation from time to time to remind myself of details, as I
want to avoid bugging people on IRC or the mailing list, and to provide
up to date and clean PRs. Per said documentation repoman is (was?)
a cornerstone of the workflow, as mentioned by others too. Developers
should not be frowned upon for using Repoman, as they were doing
exactly what was asked of them.

Additionally based on the existing documentation it was not evident
that, pkgcheck covers all checks done by repoman and more, or that it's
faster, or that it has advanced features, like scanning only commits since
HEAD/origin (I myself was only ever using it in the ebuild's directory,
because Repoman is slow when running over more than one ebuild). I've
had to read most of this thread to obtain all these details and to learn
about the proper replacements for all the steps in my workflow.

Today I've unmerged repoman and I've used only pkgdev, pkgcheck, and git
to create a new PR to force myself off Repoman. So far I think the
experience was superior to the Repoman workflow. I like that I can run
pkgcheck at the end before the push only on the commits and I don't have
to worry about Repoman trying to scan the entire tree. I think `pkgdev
commit` is quite sufficient, not sure why would one need to use
pkgcommit.

I found that mgorny's dev scripts package has a lot of irrelevant stuff
I don't need on my system (maybe not even applicable to anyone outside
of mgorny), I'd prefer we don't make it part of the mandated workflow as
is. Maybe if the generally useful scripts are separated out to some
gentoo devtoolkit package or similar, then it's okay.

Summa summarum, I think deprecating repoman is the right direction,
but documentation needs to be updated comprehensively before it's done.

Just a proxy maintainer's 2¢.

Zoltan

P.S.: I'm with Joshua about the snarkiness of the tooling, I liked that
a lot and it's a bit sad that the new tools are a bit sterile.

On Wed, Mar 09, 2022 at 04:25:17PM -0500, Ionen Wolkens wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2022 at 01:00:37PM -0800, Matt Turner wrote:
> > I'd like to deprecate and ultimately remove repoman. I believe that
> > dev-util/pkgcheck and pkgcommit (from app-portage/mgorny-dev-scripts)
>
> There's also dev-util/pkgdev as an alternative to pkgcommit with more
> features for those that want them that will feel similar to repoman
> - pkgdev commit -c/-b bugnum (repoman commit -c/-b bugnum)
> - pkgdev manifest (repoman manifest)
> - pkgdev push (runs pkgcheck scan --commits before pushing)
> - updates copyright year / manifest on commit
> - basic commit message templates, like auto "cat/pkg: add <version>" on
>   bumps without manual editing -- prepend cat/pkg: like other tools
>   if nothing specific
>
> And other handy features like pkgdev mask --rites days
>
> > are far superior replacements, and it makes sense to have people using
> > the same tool and seeing the same warnings as in the CI.
> >
> > Are there any useful checks or behaviors of repoman that are missing
> > from pkgcheck and pkgcommit?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Matt
> >
>
> --
> ionen