Open Build Service 2.0 Beta1 released

by the OBS Team posted on 25th May 2010

The Open Build Service (OBS) is a generic system to build and distribute binary packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. You can release packages as well as updates, add-ons, appliances and entire distributions for a wide range of operating systems and hardware architectures.

It is developed by a talented team of developers as Free Software and is used by many Free and Open Source software projects, companies and researchers. Including but not limited to SUSE the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution, the Tizen standards-based software platform supported by leading mobile operators and ownCloud your secure enterprise file sync and share.

This is the first beta release of version 2.0. Version 2.0 is planned to be released on June 10th. We have updated the reference server http://build.opensuse.org with the current code stream as part of our testing. We invite others running a build service to test the code and give feedback via the opensuse-buildservice mailing list and report bugs in bugzilla.

Beta1 is feature complete, new features will go in the next major release (release planned for end of 2010), we will concentrate on fixing bugs now.

Major Changes

New Web UI Tailor-Made for Packagers

The new Web UI makes your work more efficient as stuff is where it is expected, it loads faster and gives you a better access to projects, packages and meta data.

Public Read Access For Convenient Collaboration

Anonymous access gets you to packages and projects without log-in. This is pretty convenient for the users and promotes all packages in the Build Service more to the world as now search engines can index the Build Service as well. It makes it also easy to collaborate with other developers to show them your patches or log files.

New Features for Cooperation in a Team

With obs 2.0 review handling by a team is possible and roles can get assigned to groups instead of just to a single person.

Additional Changes

The full list of changes is available as part of the roadmap and includes also the following enhancements:

  • An easy way to view unsubmitted changes in development projects or new upstream releases. This is used especially for our openSUSE distribution development.
  • The request system has been enhanced: A new request type to add or change the user list of packages or projects has been added. Also review handling is now possible to allow a team to review changes prior to accepting a request.
  • Developers can receive notifications if one of their package gets branched by others.
  • Improved source handling: It's possible to undelete packages. Meta data are now under version control.
  • The build service has seen many speedups so that packages get build faster.

Try OBS 2.0 Beta 1

The reference server build.opensuse.org is available for all open source developers to build packages for the most popular distributions including openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. It is also used to build, release and maintain the openSUSE distribution.

You can download all the OBS components (Clients, API, Server, Worker) from our download page and setup your own Open Build Service instance.

Thanks!

This is a release where many different people were involved in development and even more in testing by using the openSUSE instance. We received also a number of good feature requests that got implemented. Thanks to everybody that participated!

We'd like to give special credit for the great WebUI work done by the Boosters team, mainly Coolo and Tom!

Update: Some more technical details are available as well.