packit copr cockpit-preview fails to download release tarballs

[martinpitt]

Explain what happens

I have changed packit.yaml quite a lot recently, as our propose-downstream and copr cockpit-preview builds have been broken for many months.

The most recent version uses identical actions for these two, as they are really quite similar -- they take the official release tarballs/spec, and send them to either Fedora (dist-git PR) or the cockpit-preview COPR.

The propose-downstream job was fine:

DEBUG  Remote sources or sources specified by spec_source_id (Source0 by default): ['cockpit-356.tar.xz', 'cockpit-node-356.tar.xz']
2026-02-11 11:16:36.680 distgit.py        INFO   Downloading archives: ['cockpit-356.tar.xz', 'cockpit-node-356.tar.xz']
[...]
command_handler.py INFO   + tar -xJf /tmp/sandcastle/sandcastle-exec-dir/dist-git/cockpit-356.tar.xz 'cockpit-*/runtime-npm-modules.txt' --strip-components=1

But the preview COPR srpm build failed:

upstream.py       INFO   Picking version '355' from release-monitoring.org.
upstream.py       DEBUG  Trying to extract archive_root_dir from known archives
upstream.py       DEBUG  Archive cockpit-356.tar.gz is tar.
upstream.py       DEBUG  Directory cockpit-356 found in archive cockpit-356.tar.gz
[...]
base_git.py       DEBUG  List of sources to download (url, path, optional): [('https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/releases/download/356/cockpit-node-356.tar.xz', 'cockpit-node-356.tar.xz', False)]
[...]
INFO   + tar -xJf /cockpit-356.tar.xz 'cockpit-*/runtime-npm-modules.txt' --strip-components=1
logging.py        INFO   tar (child): /cockpit-356.tar.xz: Cannot open: No such file or directory

I.e. it claims that it needs to download the release tarballs from GitHub, but it does not actually do that, so our tar command fails.

@nforro @lachmanfrantisek any idea here? Is that a packit bug? This is all still the ancient workaround for packit/packit-service#1505 . In e.g. cockpit-podman we do explicit curl calls to download the release tarball, but it seems this isn't necessary for propose_downstream, and might get in the way? Any recommendation? Thanks!