Packaging seems like a big commitment, can I just do this just for myself?¶

Yes, you can build and distribute rpm-based packages for your own purpose and desires, and we will go through some ways of doing that here. But you should consider what packaging to Fedora brings:

Periodic rebuilds (at least twice a year) with the most recent packages on Fedora.
Discoverability and contributions within Fedora and its derivatives.
Extensive testing infrastructure, including some reverse-dependency testing by the packagers of a dependency you use.
Helping community that can sometimes help you maintain a package.

You would generally lose these if you publish your packages on your own managed repository. But many Fedora packages are also managed externally in addition to the packaging done on Fedora, from which you can take some inspiration.

Upstream packaging¶

Packit offers integration for upstream projects to run the equivalent build system from Fedora on the git forge that the upstream uses for development. This was primarily covered in the Packit automation section, see it for more details. The only difference here is that now the .packit.yaml configuration is much simpler since Packit is built to support this out of the box.

specfile_path: my-package.spec

targets:
  - fedora-rawhide

jobs:
  - job: copr_build
    trigger: commit

Packit will take a git archive of the current repo and use it as the Source0 in the spec file.

Persistent copr project¶

Warning

The projects on copr are not regularly rebuilt, so a build that succeeded at some point may not be able to rebuild or be installable later on.

Beyond the usage for development work, copr can also be used to hosted persistent repositories for users to use. For this you simply need to create a copr project and hook it to your desired automation. For the Packit automation this involves setting owner and project for the copr_build job

jobs:
  - job: copr_build
    trigger: commit
    owner: lecris
    project: atuin

granting builder privilege to Packit

$ copr edit-permissions --builder packit lecris/atuin

and configuring the copr project for the Packit integration