Open Build Service version 2.4 released

[Posted April 30, 2013 by ris]

Open Build Service (OBS) 2.4 has been released. "With OBS 2.4 it is now possible to build packages in the PKGBUILD format used for instance by the popular Arch Linux distribution. This is the third package format, after RPM and DEB, supported by the OBS which makes it feasible to build and ship software for all the major Linux distributions that use a binary package format. Another popular demand for build servers these days is the support for signing individual files (bootloader, driver etc.) inside packages with a cryptographic key to support standards like UEFI secure boot. In version 2.4 the OBS sign daemon has been extend to handle this security feature. And with the rise of App-Stores as means to distribute software to end users this OBS release brings support for the cross-distribution application metadata standard AppStream."

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted Apr 30, 2013 22:11 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

Suse also released Icecream 1.0 (which LWN did not report)

http://llunak.blogspot.de/2013/04/icecream-100-released.html

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 2:37 UTC (Wed) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link] (8 responses)

I'm unclear on the capabilities of OBS -- on the surface it looks like a way of building packages for various distributions, given a source archive. One would still need to provide the instructions for building a package. As such, what is the added value provided by OBS, in contrast to building an RPM on your own machine ?

Given a Fedora spec file for building an RPM, can the RPM be built for openSUSE (ie. using the same spec file) ? Similarly, can the same spec file be used for building a DEB package? I do understand there are differences between RPM and DEB, so the latter question is probably better stated as: does OBS convert the RPM spec file to its DEB equivalent before building a DEB package ?

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 7:12 UTC (Wed) by aj (subscriber, #39001) [Link] (4 responses)

You still need RPM spec files/deb files to build - but the advantage is that you can build for several distributions and versions of distributions at the same time.

It also works for several architectures - the public instance at http://build.opensuse.org has ARM, x86-64 and PowerPC hardware available.

With the automatisms build in, it's easy to follow a source repository and create e.g. daily tarballs, run the testsuite, create a repository that others can install it or create an image (live demos) that users can run...
e.

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 7:17 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

Plus, with the spec file, you can build debs as well. It's a super convenient way to automate building your packages for lots of distributions and architectures that doesn't put any load on your local machine.

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 7:55 UTC (Wed) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you mean that given a Fedora spec file, OBS can build a package for Debian?

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 8:53 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Well, given a sufficiently good opensuse spec file, a deb will follow. It might need some tweaking in practice, but it worked for me when I joined the OBS workshop at Akademy in Tampere.

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 10:41 UTC (Wed) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]

Another thing that I find very convenient is easy cross-compilation of packages.

Your OBS checkout (copy of the data that OBS has to build a package / repository) can be used to build a specific package for a specific distro and version and a specific architecture. You can use that to locally build your package (so you don't have to wait for OBS scheduling giving you a build slot). This saves you custom setup of cross-compilation environments, produces reproducable results and makes the whole process a lot less cumbersome. (After the local build, you can use a script to copy and install the package to a device, and have a pretty nice hack-deploy-test workflow.)

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 1, 2013 11:07 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

>As such, what is the added value provided by OBS, in contrast to building an RPM on your own machine ?

OBS is what I use to build RPMs on my own machine(s) in the first place.

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 2, 2013 8:55 UTC (Thu) by wstephenson (guest, #14795) [Link]

Nobody mentioned automatic rebuilds of dependent packages yet either. Consider that OBS is a way to correctly build whole suites of packages with a high degree of automation, up to a whole distribution, if that's what you need.

Another feature is the ability to branch and modify a package in OBS, then pull modifications from the original to your tweaked version. I'm using this to track the openSUSE KDE Team's updates to KDE packages as I develop Klyde based on them. Shares the workload of developing packages while allowing individual tweaks.

Open Build Service version 2.4 released

Posted May 4, 2013 6:18 UTC (Sat) by geuder (guest, #62854) [Link]

> I'm unclear on the capabilities of OBS

You are not alone, it takes some time to understand the system. But it is definitely worth it (well, if you have to build software packages)

For the first OBS is a piece of software. You can install it "at home". However, most people won't do that and for a beginner it will take more like weeks than days to get everything set up.

Luckily the guys at Suse have a public instance at http://build.opensuse.org.
Just register and start using it. Back in the days of MeeGo they also had a public instance, but I'm not aware of any other public ones.

> what is the added value provided by OBS, in contrast to building an RPM on your own machine ?

Actually you can build on your own machine using OBS. It's called localbuild. My last real life use case went like this: A customer uses SLES (Suse's commercial Linux distro with ancient^H^H^Hstable package versions). It's a production machine, I don't want to install compilers and development packages. On my development machine I have OpenSUSE (but I have done the same thing using the Ubuntu OBS client before). Using OBS I can quickly localbuild a package for SLES. The added value of OBS is that behind the scene it sets up a suitable chroot containing the desired target system. I could be any of http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Build_Service_supported_b...

The benefit of building "on the server" is automatic dependency tracking.
If an underlying package has been rebuilt, all depending ones will be rebuilt, too. If you are working on a system with many interdependent packages (or a whole distro) it might be worth setting up your own OBS instance.