Re: How can we improve the Changes Process?

On Sun, 2026-06-28 at 15:21 -0500, Maxwell G wrote:
> 
> We should move away from the Wiki and wikitext formatting. Wikitext is 
> yet another text markup format that we use in Fedora that is not 
> familiar to everyone, and it's apparently hard to parse 
> programmatically. We could consider storing metadata about Changes (such 
> as targeted release, change owners, status, FESCo issue number) in a 
> structured way using Markdown front-matter that tools that work with 
> Changes can easily consume.
> 
> Changes should be written in markdown, or a markup format that can be 
> easily converted to markdown or bbcode for display on Discourse, and 
> also for plain text emails. If we use asciidoc, that would allow us to 
> publish approved Changes to docs.fedoraproject.org which might be nice.

An issue with this is that we *do* have existing tools that work with
the wiki:

https://pagure.io/fedora-pgm/pgm_scripts/tree/main

(and yes, we need to migrate them off pagure, sigh). The ones in
changes/ are older ones that were written by bcotton and which I've
made some updates to since for amoloney. The ones in
Change_Wrangler_Scripts/ were AI-generated by alking while she was
covering for amoloney; they're a bit AI-crazy but they mostly work, I
think. The scripts don't cover everything - there's a lot more
automation that could be done - but they do cover quite a lot.

I've been wanting to make similar proposals for a while, but we'd kinda
need to change the process and improve the automation *at the same
time* for it all to make sense, and I have not had enough time to block
out and commit to all of that work. If you do, that'd be great...

> We should store Changes as text files in a git repository. Change owners 
> would propose Changes by filing a PR against the repository and then the 
> Change would be announced after the Change Wrangler reviews and merges 
> the Change text. We could have CI checks to validate Changes (e.g., to 
> make sure that system-wide Changes have the correct optional fields) and 
> various other opportunities for automation that we don't have with the wiki.

It's maybe worth considering the case of people who might want to file
a Change who are *not* familiar with git/forge workflows. Probably most
Change proposers are, but we should at least consider how scary this
might be for someone who is not.
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @[email protected]
https://www.happyassassin.net



-- 
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]
Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new