OpenSuse Build Service

[edit] Our Goals

We want:

to allow freedom for developers to develop;
to provide a build service and SDK
to work with the core distro as much as possible
to provide excellent quality assured applications for our "app store";
to extend the core distro with a community supported Surrounds area for libraries and packages that are depended upon by more than one application.

Lets set out some basics about the OBS.

It's a build system. You put source on it and say "use this repository" and it builds a minimal SDK-like chroot using the deb/rpms it finds in that repository
It has packages - a package corresponds to a tarball and a spec/dsc
It has projects - a project is like a directory with packages
When a package is built it is 'published' from the project where it was uploaded into a corresponding repository (which can be used to build other projects)
The repositories can also be used by devices to download binary packages.

The 'trick' then, is to set up a structure of projects that we can use to support the publishing and sharing activities that we need.

Some tasks needed to get the OBS running: