Releasing Avocado

So you have all PRs approved, the Sprint meeting is done and now Avocado is ready to be released. Great, let’s go over (most of) the details you need to pay attention to.

Which repositories you should pay attention to

In general, a release of Avocado includes taking a look and eventually release content in the following repositories:

  • avocado

  • avocado-vt

How to release?

All the necessary steps are in JSON “testplans” to be executed with the following commands:

$ scripts/avocado-run-testplan -t examples/testplans/release/pre.json
$ scripts/avocado-run-testplan -t examples/testplans/release/release.json

Just follow the steps and have a nice release!

How to refresh Fedora rawhide

This is an outline of the steps to update the Fedora rawhide packages. This example is based on updating from 82.0 to 83.0.

Update downstream python-avocado package

  1. Use pagure to create a personal fork of the downstream Fedora dist-git python-avocado package source repository https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-avocado if you don’t already have one.

  2. Clone your personal fork repository to your local workspace.

  3. Checkout the latest branch, and make sure your latest branch is in sync with the most recent commits from the official dist-git repo you forked from.

  4. Locate the official upstream commit hash and date corresponding to the upstream GitHub release tag. (eg., https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/releases/tag/75.1) Use those values to update the %global commit and %global commit_date lines in the downstream python-avocado.spec file.

  5. Update the Version: line with the new release tag.

  6. Reset the Release: line to 1%{?gitrel}%{?dist}.

  7. Add a new entry at the beginning of the %changelog section with a message similar to Sync with upstream release 83.0..

  8. See what changed in the upstream SPEC file since the last release. You can do this by comparing branches on GitHub (eg., https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/compare/82.0..83.0) and searching for python-avocado.spec. If there are changes beyond just the %global commit, %global commit_date, and Version: lines, and the %changelog section, make any necessary corresponding changes to the downstream SPEC file. Note: the commit hash in the upstream SPEC file will be different that what gets put in the downstream SPEC file since the upstream hash was added to the file before the released commit was made. Add an additional note to your %changelog message if there were any noteworthy changes.

  9. Download the new upstream source tarball based on the updated SPEC by running:

    spectool -g python-avocado.spec

  10. Add the new source tarball to the dist-git lookaside cache and update your local repo by running:

    fedpkg new-sources avocado-83.0.tar.gz

  11. Create a Fedora source RPM from the updated SPEC file and tarball by running:

    fedpkg --release f33 srpm

    It should write an SRPM file (eg., python-avocado-83.0-1.fc33.src.rpm) to the current directory.

  12. Test build the revised package locally using mock. Run the build using the same Fedora release for which the SRPM was created:

    mock -r fedora-33-x86_64 python-avocado-83.0-1.fc33.src.rpm

  13. If the package build fails, go back and fix the SPEC file, re-create the SRPM, and retry the mock build. It is occasionally necessary to create a patch to disable specific tests or pull in some patches from upstream to get the package to build correctly. See https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-avocado/tree/69lts as an example.

  14. Repeat the SRPM generation and mock build for all other supported Fedora releases, Fedora Rawhide, and the applicable EPEL (currently EPEL8).

  15. When you have successful builds for all releases, git add, git commit, and git push your updates.