Packaging for Fedora: woolly! Checking the dependency hell

If you’ve ever been interested in bringing software to Fedora that you use and thought would be interesting for the community, but were unsure about what you’d need to package to make it work, fear not! woolly is here to help with this arduous process!

What is woolly?

In general, woolly is a project I started due to a demand from my work at Red Hat. My team had a requirement to deliver two large projects on Fedora:

• Goose
• Linux MCP Server

Some people on the team already had experience in packaging, but others did not.

Both projects mentioned above bring with them several dependencies (which are often not present in the Fedora repositories), therefore, it becomes a challenge for experienced and amateur packagers to discover the complete list of dependencies that will be necessary to bring from the upstream projects to downstream.

So, from this need, woolly was born.

If you’ve ever had to package something for Fedora (or any other Linux distribution), you know how painful that task can be. An endless sea of dependencies, projects that don’t configure their dependencies as optional, etc. All of this contributes to the difficulty of identifying and putting together an action plan to start this journey, especially for projects that are still active, since the list of dependencies can change considerably depending on the maintainers.

In short, woolly can discover the dependencies needed for your project, and tell you exactly what already exists in the Fedora repositories (which versions are present, too!), what’s missing, and generate reports that can facilitate your (or your team’s) understanding.

It looks perfect! How do I get the woolly?

woolly is available from pypi, therefore, a simple:

pip install woolly

# ou

pipx install woolly

Will get you to the latest version.

How do I use woolly?

Using woolly is very easy! The user interface was designed to be intuitive and simple, so we don’t want distractions, but rather useful information! Take a look at the following example:

woolly check serde

The above command will produce the following output:

Analyzing Rust package: serde
Registry: crates.io
Cache directory: /home/r0x0d/.cache/woolly

  Analyzing Rust dependencies ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% • 0:00:05 complete!

Dependency Summary for 'serde' (Rust)
╭────────────────────────────┬───────╮
│ Metric                     │ Value │
├────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ Total dependencies checked │    10 │
│ Packaged in Fedora         │     7 │
│ Missing from Fedora        │     0 │
╰────────────────────────────┴───────╯

Dependency Tree:
serde v1.0.228 • ✓ packaged (1.0.225, 1.0.228)
└── serde_core v1.0.228 • ✓ packaged (1.0.225, 1.0.228)
    └── serde_derive v1.0.228 • ✓ packaged (1.0.225, 1.0.228)
        ├── proc-macro2 v1.0.103 • ✓ packaged (1.0.101, 1.0.103)
        │   └── unicode-ident v1.0.22 • ✓ packaged (1.0.19, 1.0.22)
        ├── quote v1.0.42 • ✓ packaged (0.3.15, 1.0.40, 1.0.41)
        │   └── proc-macro2 v1.0.103 • ✓ (already visited)
        └── syn v2.0.111 • ✓ packaged (1.0.109, 2.0.106, 2.0.111)
            ├── proc-macro2 v1.0.103 • ✓ (already visited)
            └── unicode-ident v1.0.22 • ✓ (already visited)

Log saved to: /home/r0x0d/.local/state/woolly/logs/woolly_20251210_091241.log

See how simple it is to use woolly to check the dependencies of a given upstream project? Rust is used by default in woolly since the project was born from the need to check the dependencies of projects in Rust, but it also has support for Python.

woolly check -l py flask

And the output is:

Analyzing Python package: flask
Registry: PyPI
Cache directory: /home/r0x0d/.cache/woolly

  Analyzing Python dependencies ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% • 0:00:07 complete!

    Dependency Summary for 'flask'
               (Python)
╭────────────────────────────┬───────╮
│ Metric                     │ Value │
├────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ Total dependencies checked │    13 │
│ Packaged in Fedora         │    11 │
│ Missing from Fedora        │     0 │
╰────────────────────────────┴───────╯

Dependency Tree:
flask v3.1.2 • ✓ packaged (3.1.2)
├── blinker v1.9.0 • ✓ packaged (1.9)
├── click v8.3.1 • ✓ packaged (8.1.7)
│   └── colorama v0.4.6 • ✓ packaged (0.4.6)
├── importlib-metadata v8.7.0 • ✓ packaged (8.7)
│   ├── zipp v3.23.0 • ✓ packaged (3.23)
│   └── typing-extensions v4.15.0 • ✓ packaged (4.15)
├── itsdangerous v2.2.0 • ✓ packaged (2.2)
├── jinja2 v3.1.6 • ✓ packaged (3.1.6)
│   └── markupsafe v3.0.3 • ✓ packaged (3.0.2)
├── markupsafe v3.0.3 • ✓ (already visited)
└── werkzeug v3.1.4 • ✓ packaged (3.1.3)
    └── markupsafe v3.0.3 • ✓ (already visited)

Log saved to: /home/r0x0d/.local/state/woolly/logs/woolly_20251210_091548.log

Showing only optional dependencies

Woolly also has support for displaying the optional dependencies of projects, as this can be useful to check to find out which extras you can enable for your project.

woolly check -l py flask --optional

Obviously, the command above takes much longer to execute, since the project may have several optional dependencies to be consulted:

Analyzing Python package: flask
Including optional dependencies
Registry: PyPI
Cache directory: /home/r0x0d/.cache/woolly

  Analyzing Python dependencies ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% • 0:00:01 complete!

    Dependency Summary for 'flask'
               (Python)
╭────────────────────────────┬───────╮
│ Metric                     │ Value │
├────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ Total dependencies checked │    41 │
│ Packaged in Fedora         │    10 │
│ Missing from Fedora        │     0 │
│                            │       │
│ Optional dependencies      │    27 │
│   ├─ Packaged              │     2 │
│   └─ Missing               │     0 │
╰────────────────────────────┴───────╯

Dependency Tree:
flask v3.1.2 • ✓ packaged (3.1.2)
├── blinker v1.9.0 • ✓ packaged (1.9)
├── click v8.3.1 • ✓ packaged (8.1.7)
│   └── colorama (max depth reached)
├── importlib-metadata v8.7.0 • ✓ packaged (8.7)
│   ├── zipp (max depth reached)
│   ├── typing-extensions (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── importlib-resources (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── packaging (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pyfakefs (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── flufl-flake8 (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest-perf (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── jaraco-test (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── sphinx (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── jaraco-packaging (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── rst-linker (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── furo (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── sphinx-lint (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── jaraco-tidelift (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── ipython (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest-checkdocs (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest-ruff (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest-cov (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest-enabler (optional) (max depth reached)
│   └── pytest-mypy (optional) (max depth reached)
├── itsdangerous v2.2.0 • ✓ packaged (2.2)
├── jinja2 v3.1.6 • ✓ packaged (3.1.6)
│   ├── markupsafe (max depth reached)
│   └── babel (optional) (max depth reached)
├── markupsafe v3.0.3 • ✓ packaged (3.0.2)
├── werkzeug v3.1.4 • ✓ packaged (3.1.3)
│   ├── markupsafe (max depth reached)
│   └── watchdog (optional) (max depth reached)
├── asgiref v3.11.0 (optional) • ✓ packaged (3.8.1)
│   ├── typing-extensions (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest (optional) (max depth reached)
│   ├── pytest-asyncio (optional) (max depth reached)
│   └── mypy (optional) (max depth reached)
└── python-dotenv v1.2.1 (optional) • ✓ packaged (1.1)
    └── click (optional) (max depth reached)

Whenever you check the optional dependencies of a project, remember to use the --max-depth parameter to limit the analysis, otherwise, woolly will happily check all the optional dependencies of everything 😅

Showing missing only dependencies

Following the same idea as optional dependencies, woolly also has the ability to show only what is missing from the Fedora repositories:

woolly check -l py cyclopts -m

Analyzing Python package: cyclopts
Registry: PyPI
Cache directory: /home/r0x0d/.cache/woolly

  Analyzing Python dependencies ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% • 0:00:00 complete!

  Dependency Summary for 'cyclopts'
               (Python)
╭────────────────────────────┬───────╮
│ Metric                     │ Value │
├────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ Total dependencies checked │    12 │
│ Packaged in Fedora         │     9 │
│ Missing from Fedora        │     2 │
╰────────────────────────────┴───────╯

Missing packages that need packaging:
  • cyclopts
  • rich-rst

Log saved to: /home/r0x0d/.local/state/woolly/logs/woolly_20251210_093409.log

This option is useful for large projects, since the list of dependencies can reach 100+, so, using the --missing-only parameter, we have a view of only what is missing.

Generating reports

One of the coolest features we have with woolly is the ability to generate reports in different formats, allowing you to customize how you see the results of your project’s dependencies!

Format	Description	Aliases
stdout	Rich console output (default)	console, terminal
markdown	Markdown report file	md
json	JSON report file (machine-readable)	-
template	Custom template-based report (requires –template)	tpl, jinja, jinja2

Contributing to woolly

All types of contributions are very welcome to the project! If you are interested in contributing, whether with code, documentation, or even reporting problems, please feel free to do so through the repository on Github.