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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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.

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).

The openSUSE Build Service allows from now on more control about what to do with built packages. You can for example switch of the publishing of packages to the ftp server and mirrors, when you prepare a major update in your project.

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