🔧 Original Statement:

“Basically I made some changes to our dist-gits so I could programmatically determine what the NVR should be when we do a release and can tag the kernel at the same time. The earlier ones you can see that they’re not quite as consistent.”

🧠 Explanation:

1. “dist-gits”

This refers to distribution Git repositories—typically used in Linux distributions like Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL. These repos contain the packaging metadata (like spec files, patches, and build scripts) for building software packages, including the kernel.

2. “programmatically determine what the NVR should be”

NVR stands for Name-Version-Release.
It’s a standard naming convention in RPM-based distributions (like Fedora/RHEL) to uniquely identify a package.
- Example: kernel-5.14.0-123.el9
  - Name: kernel
  - Version: 5.14.0
  - Release: 123.el9

The speaker is saying they automated the process of generating this NVR string, likely based on Git tags, commit history, or changelogs.

3. “when we do a release and can tag the kernel at the same time”

They’ve synchronised the release process with Git tagging.
This means that when a new kernel version is released, a Git tag is created at the same time, and the NVR is automatically calculated and applied.

4. “the earlier ones you can see that they’re not quite as consistent”

Before this automation, the NVRs or tags might have been manually created or inconsistently named.
This could lead to confusion, mismatches, or difficulty tracking which kernel version corresponds to which release.

✅ Summary:

The person improved the kernel packaging workflow by modifying the distribution Git repositories to automatically generate consistent NVRs and tag the kernel source during releases. This replaces a previously inconsistent, possibly manual process.

Would you like a visual diagram of how this process works, or maybe a sample script that could automate NVR generation from Git tags?