Hello avid gamers and game developers!

We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-base) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries).

This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together. If you have already added old game repositories, please remove them and add the brand new one located at download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ and then the directory of your distribution. The old URLs for the individual games repositories will no longer work.

If your favorite game is not yet packaged you can add it to the Games Wishlist at openSUSE wiki. Or even better, you can try to package it by yourself and when you are finished contact Pavol Rusnak and we will add the game to the repository. You can also ask on the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list you have any troubles with the packaging.

Game On!

Michal Vyskocil has requested a new mailing list around Java topics. You can subscribe to it or browse the newly created archive. This nicely fits our other Java changes, which can be discussed on the mailing list:

• Debian and Ubuntu based Java buildings: It was not possible so far to build Java based packages for Debian or Ubuntu, because Java lives there in non-free or Multiverse repositories. We have imported these as Debian:Etch:NonFree or Ubuntu:*:Multiverse projects to offer java builds in future. We would like to thank Carsten Höger from Open-Xchange for his help and the needed java preinit package. A nice example for using Java on deb based distributions is the server:OX:snapshot project.
• openSUSE:Factory is using open source Java from openJDK6 now. We switched to openJDK6 as default Java to be able to deliver a complete open source Factory distribution including Java. This is currently not a final decision, just a test approach to evaluate the situation. This affects also everybody who builds a Java package for Factory using the generic “BuildRequires: java-devel”, openJDK6 will be used in this case as a Java environment. A drawback is the increased bootstrap time for Java in Factory atm, increasing the time for a complete Factory rebuild to several days. We are working hard to avoid this again in future.

The openSUSE team is proud to announce another major release of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). This release brings a new level to OBS scalability by adding the ability for OBS instances to interact.

The 0.9 release will help grow a world-wide network of build service instances. OBS instances can automatically interact with each other and reuse projects residing on other OBS instances. New installations of OBS are automatically configured to work with the main openSUSE Build Service, which makes it easy to set up new instances and minimize network traffic while keeping data in sync automatically.

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Ever had problems finding a package for your favorite application for your favorite distro? Are you an application developer or project contributor, and want to learn how to provide binary packages for all the popular distros (including openSUSE) automatically?

Using the openSUSE Build Service, you can provide packages for most popular Linux distros using one single service. Rather than maintaining separate systems to build packages, you can take advantage of the openSUSE Build Service and let it do most of the work.

To learn how to leverage the build service, join the openSUSE community on April 4th and 5th on IRC to hone your package building skills. The Packaging Days II event will be held on Freenode at #opensuse-buildservice. Community members will be standing by to provide support and answer questions about using the build service and creating packages.

Find out more about the Packaging Days II event at: http://en.opensuse.org/Packaging/Packaging_Day

The openSUSE Build Service, an innovative framework that provides an infrastructure for software developers to easily create and compile packages for multiple Linux distributions, has extended its support to build packages for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The openSUSE Build Service already supports several Linux distributions including openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu.

“As its name suggests, the openSUSE project is committed to choice and opposed to the exclusion of innovation simply because it may have originated in another project,” said Michael Loeffler, openSUSE product manager at Novell. “By adding support to build packages for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the openSUSE Build Service makes it even easier to build packages across multiple Linux distributions, thus further enabling innovative ideas to spread quickly throughout the free and open source software community. As we seek to streamline and improve collaboration between all Linux developers, the openSUSE Build Service continues to innovate and improve the way packages are built by providing a common framework that works with any Linux distribution.”

Huge thanks and congratulations go to Adrian Schröter and the openSUSE Build Service team for implementing this great new capability.

The openSUSE project releases the version 0.5 of the openSUSE Build Service. This code drop does provide the functionality as provided on build.opensuse.org the first time as official tar ball release. Pointsettia provides the complete infrastructure to build single hardware architecture distributions. System images can be created via KIWI.

Overview of enhancements in Poinsettia:

• Improved repository generation. Repositories get generated out of process of the scheduler. This makes the scheduler faster and more reliable
• Improved signing for repositories. Each project get now its individual gpg key for the repositories
• Convenient project deletion now available
• Bugzilla linkage. Link added to create new Bugzilla reports for certain projects or packages
• For a detailed list look here

The openSUSE Build Service is designed to host sources of packages. It can reuse sources from other source repository systems like svn or cvs, but it is more often used to maintain all necessary files around a tar ball release from another open source project.

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As you know for sure ;), the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) shall connect the complete different worlds of End-Users and developers/packager. This does of course already worked to that degree that everybody can download software, which got packaged in the OBS. Also the packager do already got feedback via download numbers, tags or rating within the packager web interface.

Andreas Bauer added lately the next functionality in this context. All search results in the End User interface do offer now a link to the packager web interface from now on. Every user, with a standard openSUSE account can now do the ratings and taging there directly. This will help the to improve the search results for other users later on.

Also new is the bugreport link, this means end users can create bugreports for projects or packages hosted in OBS. Such a bugreport will get assigned to the person, who is defined as bugowner. Atm only a few projects have this defined, so this is a call to all project or package owners to add yourself. This can be done easily in the web gui, simply add yourself again to the project, but switch to the “bugowner” role.

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Klaas wrote an article about the openSUSE Build Service that got published in the german edition of Linux Magazin. Everyone able to read german go here.

It covers general introduction into openSUSE’s Build Service, tutorials how to build a simple package, touches upon OSC and web client and gives an overview over the underlying technology.

As part of their openSUSE release series, Novell Open Audio has talked to Michael Schröder and Andreas Bauer about the openSUSE Build Service, our powerful cross-distribution package build system. They discuss a bunch of updates which happened over the year since last coverage, what is being worked on currently and a little bit on how you can have your projects hosted on the service.

The highlights of this week’s status mails, for your convenience as a news article!

• We are working on a new LiveCD with updated packages (beta version here).
• Unfortunately the online update last weekend caused some problems, so we are thinking about how to avoid this next time. More information on this soon.
• FOSDEM 2008 planing started, join the discussion later this week on the opensuse-project mailinglist. Great news from the OBS team: Klaas wrote a 6 page article for the German Linux Magazine about the Build Service!

More information is available in the specific mailing list posts; if you are not subscribed to the mailinglists you can also read them in the archive. Here are the direct links to the mails:

• Distribution
• Communication/Wiki/Events
• Build Service