RPM.org Website

This repository holds the Jekyll source files used to generate the official RPM website. The site is generated using a GitHub Actions workflow.

On the website, we publish RPM and POPT releases as well as other news related to the project. It also links to the in-tree documentation which is generated from the upstream RPM repository.

Development

To preview the site locally, install Jekyll (natively packaged on most distros) and run the following command from the root directory of your git checkout:

jekyll serve

This will print a localhost URL which you can open in your browser.

Release metadata

RPM releases are represented as a Jekyll collection in the _releases/ directory. The collection is used to generate individual release pages as well as release announcements on the Home page.

Each document in the collection is named after the version it represents (e.g. 4.20.1.md) and contains a YAML front matter describing the release's properties. The body of the document, which is in flavoured Markdown format, starts with an optional bulleted list of highlights (an "overview") followed by the release notes.

Required fields

• version - RPM version (from CMake)
• baseline - Which RPM version the release notes compare against
• checksum - SHA256 checksum of the tarball
• date - Release date (YYYY-MM-DD)

Optional fields

• summary - A brief summary (one or two sentences) of the release, without a period at the end
• overview - Whether the document has an overview section (default: true)
• draft - Whether the document is a draft (default: false)

Drafts

We typically publish preliminary release notes for upcoming major releases in advance. These are marked as drafts (see above) which causes them to not have an announcement generated on the Home page.

Drafts don't require a checksum field. The semantics of the date field is "last modified at".

Prereleases

We also publish prereleases ("snapshots") for upcoming major releases. These documents are named after the actual version from CMake (e.g. 5.99.92.md) and are marked by setting the snapshot field to one of alphaN, betaN or rcN (where N is the respin number, starting at 1).

The version field is set to the target version (e.g. 4.20.0), for which a draft document must exist. The baseline field is set to the name of the previous snapshot (if any).

Rarely, we may decide to skip an RC tarball altogether and just go ahead with the final release. In such a case, do leave out the checksum field, which will prompt the prerelease page to render in a slightly different way where the Download subsection is omitted and replaced with a note about the release having been "promoted for final as-is".

Supported releases

The stable series (e.g. 4.19.x) currently in support are configured in the _data/projects.yml file. This determines which releases are shown on the Releases page.

Markdown flavour

You can use the following extra syntax elements in the release documents:

• GitHub ticket references - Prefix the issue or PR number with a hash sign and put the whole in parentheses, for example: (#1234). These will be converted into clickable links.
• Man page references - Use italics for the man page name, followed by the section number in parentheses, for example: *rpm*(8). These will be converted to clickable links. Note that only our own man pages will be linked, though.
• RHEL Jira references - Enclose the issue ID in parentheses, for example: (RHEL-1234). These will be converted into clickable links.
• Bugzilla references - Prefix the bugzilla ID with RhBug: and put the whole in parentheses, for example: (RhBug:123456). These will be converted into clickable links.

URLs enclosed in < and > will be converted into clickable links as well.

News entries

For generic announcements, we use the default collection in the _posts/ directory. These entries are merged with the release announcements when rendering the Home page.