openSUSE Build Service Hits 1.0

by Mike Gunderloy - Jul. 09, 2008Comments (2)

The openSUSE team announced today the release of openSUSE Build Service 1.0. If you haven't been deeply involved in the production side of an open source project, the significance of this announcement may escape you. But in the long run, many everyday Linux users stand to benefit from this tool - if it catches on with developers.

One of the problems that software developers face when writing applications for Linux is how to distribute their work to end users. The easy answer is to just ship the code, and tell users to build it themselves - and indeed, most of us are quite practiced at the configure/make/make install dance.

But that isn't a workable answer for the bulk of less-technical users that many hope Linux will continue to attract. Hence, the rise of packaging systems: Red Hat's rpm format, Debian's dpkg, and so on. Software packaged to one of these standards is easier for end users to install, but now the developer faces a dilemma: which packaging standard should he support? Or how much effort should you put into packaging the same application for multiple systems?

That's where the openSUSE Build Service comes in. If you (as a developer) use it for your software, you can have the openSUSE build farms churn out a variety of formats for you - it will pack your software up for openSUSE, Debian, Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and more - and in fact, for several versions of each supported operating system. There are other useful features here too, including a package search to help end users find software to install, and automatic dependency checking (so that if your software depends on package X, your bits will get automatically rebuilt when X's maintainers check in a change).

So far, the bulk of the packages in the Build Service appear to be those used for openSUSE itself, and they're not taking wide advantage of the cross-system builds yet. But it seems clear that initiatives like this can ultimately streamline Linux software development a good deal. As Linux continues to mature and its market share increases, tools like the openSUSE Build Service will be increasingly important to maintaining a healthy ecosystem.


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2 Comments
 

This sure is cool. Often times, you end up searching Google or other dedicated package sites searching for packages that contain all the required dependencies. Now, a great service would be to have this integrated into YUM, APTINSTALL and others, so you can get these easily via those tools.

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agreed


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