If you are maintaining packages of software that uses pbr, there are some features you probably want to be aware of that can make your life easier. They are exposed by environment variables, so adding them to rules or spec files should be fairly easy.
pbr, when run in a git repo, derives the version of a package from the git tags. When run in a tarball with a proper egg-info dir, it will happily pull the version from that. So for the most part, the packager shouldn't need to care. However, if you are doing something like keeping a git repo with the sources and the packaging intermixed and it's causing pbr to get confused about whether its in its own git repo or not, you can set PBR_VERSION:
PBR_VERSION=1.2.3
and all version calculation logic will be completely skipped and the supplied version will be considered absolute.
pbr overrides almost everything having to do with python dependency resolution and calls out to pip. In the python source package world this leads to a more consistent experience. However, in the distro packaging world, dependencies are handled by the distro. Setting SKIP_PIP_INSTALL:
SKIP_PIP_INSTALL=1
will cause all logic around use of pip to be skipped, including the logic that includes pip as a dependency of pbr itself.
pbr includes everything in a source tarball that is in the original git repository. This can again cause havoc if a packager is doing fancy things with combined git repos, and is generating a source tarball using python setup.py sdist from that repo. If that is the workflow the packager is using, setting SKIP_GIT_SDIST:
SKIP_GIT_SDIST=1
will cause all logic around using git to find the files that should be in the source tarball to be skipped. Beware though, that because pbr packages automatically find all of the files, most of them do not have a complete MANIFEST.in file, so its possible that a tarball produced in that way will be missing files.
pbr generates AUTHORS and ChangeLog files from git information. This can cause problem in distro packaging if packager is using git repository for packaging source. If that is the case setting SKIP_GENERATE_AUTHORS
SKIP_GENERATE_AUTHORS=1
will cause logic around generating AUTHORS using git information to be skipped. Similarly setting SKIP_WRITE_GIT_CHANGELOG
SKIP_WRITE_GIT_CHANGELOG=1
will cause logic around generating ChangeLog file using git information to be skipped.