I would like to work on this now, but have question about the retirement process. I looked at the documentation and it seems that only thing I need to do is to create a dead.package file with correct content on rawhide branch. Is that correct or do I need to do something else as well?

Yes, it should be just removing all existing files and add a new dead.package file. This emits a commit message that the block retired toddler processes and blocks the package in koji.

There may be something passing the retirement reason to pagure-dist-git also, but it might read that from the dead.package/comment message?

That should be relatively easy to do. Thanks for clarifying.

Implemented in https://pagure.io/fedora-infra/toddlers/pull-request/344

I was able to finally get the push working on small reproducer I wrote. So this PR should be the last batch of changes.

I was able to create a testing repo on staging, so I'm closing this as done. Will deploy the changes on production on Monday.