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

As part of their openSUSE release series, Novell Open Audio has talked to Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel and Stephan Kulow about KIWI, openSUSE’s operating system imaging solution. They talk about how you can create a customized distro, USB and preload images, and how it was used to create the openSUSE 10.3 Live-CDs. In the second part Reinhard Max describes Asterisk, an open source telephony engine and tool kit, where to find packages for openSUSE and its usage within Novell.

A small team has created videos of the openSUSE 10.3 installation with commentary and plans to create further ones. — A Live-CD based on openSUSE 10.3 with the KDE 4.0 Beta 3+ packages from the KDE:KDE4 build service project has been announced. — Build Service architect Klaas Freitag posted a proposal for a “Personal Message Dispatching” system with code name Hermes in the openSUSE Build Service and asks for feedback.

An updated Roadmap for the openSUSE Build Service has been published. It outlines the development targets until the fourth quarter of 2008. Please understand the dates as target estimations, but not as guaranteed dates. Some functionality might arrive earlier, while other features may need some more time.

We are also to happy to help anyone to start working on any of these functionalities, if you would like to see it earlier available. Please drop a mail in that case to the opensuse-buildservice mailing list (subscribe).