Flock 2023

At the last in-person Flock (Budapest), I gave a talk about a new project I was starting called rpminspect. I was taking a long established internal tool at Red Hat and redesigning it as an end user developer tool. The main objective was to be able to make this workflow tool part of our new gating process for builds. I had put together enough of the tool to have it start running on the side so developers could see the output. I also had measured its performance against the existing internal tool and was able to show a large improvement. The feedback in the talk was good and a lot of good ideas came up, but I still had a lot of work to do. Skip ahead roughly 3 years and rpminspect is in use for Fedora builds, CentOS Stream builds, and internally at Red Hat for RHEL builds. There is an active set of contributors and I regularly get patches that either fix bugs or add new functionality. Catering the tool to work with three different distributions really does expose the major differences between them and what they need. This has been the biggest challenge. Maintaining that balance so I don't have to develop three different tools. This talk is about the last three years of development of rpminspect, the introduction of CentOS Stream and how that changed what I was doing, and how I have adapted the project over time to keep it useful and somewhat futureproof. Mistakes have been made, but there are some wins. And if you are not aware of rpminspect and how it works for Fedora developers, come to the talk to learn that.