The Principle of automatic releases and changelog in rpmautospec

The goal of rpmautospec is to relieve packagers from the burden of manually updating the Release field and %changelog section in RPM spec files.

The way it works in Koji is that just after the git repository has been cloned, a dedicated plugin is run to preprocess the spec file:

• The plugin checks if the packager uses any of the rpmautospec features, and if not, stops right here. All following steps are only run if the packager has opted in.

• It crawls the git history to count the number of commits since the last time the package version was bumped and to generate the changelog from the contents of the changelog file (if present) plus the logs of commits after this file changed for the last time.

• It prepends a suitably defined %autorelease macro to the top of the spec file, freezing the computed value of the release number and thus allowing reproducible builds.

• Finally, it replaces the %autochangelog macro with the generated changelog.

At this point, the spec file has the release macro defined at its top and a changelog defined at its bottom, it is a fully functional spec file that is passed onto the rest of the “build SRPM” process.

The resulting SRPM can be reproducibly built, locally or in another build system. Note that none of the changes made to the spec file are committed back to the git repository.