openSUSE Build Service did it!

The openSUSE 11.1 beta 1 release marks a significant change for openSUSE. For 
the first time in 11 years, a SUSE release was not built in the SUSE internal 
AutoBuild service ? openSUSE 11.1 beta 1 was built using the openSUSE Build 
Service!

AutoBuild was the first full automated system on this planet which built Linux 
distributions. It served us well, with reliable building of the SUSE 
distributions. It guaranteed that depending packages got rebuild to avoid 
unexpected incompatibilities, and guaranteed that a build is reproducible by 
setting up a complete system for each package build. (This happens around 
3,500 times per full distribution build and per architecture. This results in 
more than 10 thousand system installations for building a openSUSE 
distribution once!)

However, 11 years is a long time in the IT industry. New requirements are 
appearing and the openSUSE project in particular needed an open system, not 
limited to SUSE/Novell employees.

The openSUSE  Build Service is designed with all good ideas from AutoBuild, 
but as a more transparent and distributable system. We invented for example 
the Product Definition lately, which describes all needed information 
describing all openSUSE medias. The Build Service automatically creates 
needed packages and KIWI image build descriptions, and will create the 
openSUSE product flavors, like the ISO images, or installation source trees.
This functionality makes it easy to rebuild the entire distribution. Together 
with the functionality of Build Service interconnect it makes it even 
possible that you can rebuild the openSUSE distribution at home. Either by 
recompiling it completely, replacing only a few packages, or just adding one.
Projects like the Education project can use this to create their derived 
distribution more easily.

The current status is that some of this functionality needs still manual work. 
We will release a new version of the Build Service as soon as we have 
automated it fully and integrated it well.

It is now really transparent to see what state things are in, just by visiting 
the openSUSE:Factory project in Build Service. Everybody can also join in to 
fix stuff using the collaboration features.

All this new transparency, flexibility, and reliability of the OBS lead to the 
situation that we currently switch also internally from AutoBuild to Build 
Service for building SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. This proves that this system 
is good enough for Novell as well to rely on it. Even though we need to add 
some more functionality and fix some more bugs. 

References are listed at:

 http://news.opensuse.org/2008/09/22/obs-did-it/

PS: Greetings to SUSE founder Burchard Steinbild, who implemented the first 
version of AutoBuild, which was the reason of the success of SUSE :)

-- 

Adrian Schroeter
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG N?rnberg)
email: adrian@suse.de

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