Open Build Service projects during Hackweek 9
Next week is Hackweek! At least twice a year all SUSE engineers are free to work for one week on projects of their passion. They can choose to contribute to an existing open source project or try something new, nobody has tried before. One whole week of innovation, collaboration, and learning. If you want to know more check the great hackweek.suse.com.
As very integral building block of the openSUSE/SUSE universum the Open Build Service will be one of the big topics that all those smart SUSE folks will work on. Let us introduce you to some of the projects that are going to happen in and around the OBS.
Improved group submission workflow, ♥Stephan Kulow♥
Our very own Coolo will scratch a nasty, sore, purulent itch of his. In his day job he's a release manager and has to take care that all the great packaging work of the openSUSE community ends up neatly folded in the development distribution (Factory).
openSUSE is developed by teams of people that work in their own projects, taking care of a group of packages that belong to a topic like GNOME, Openstack or Geosciences. They usually nurture their packages in their project until they are ready to be included into Factory, then submit all of them at once. Thanks to the OBS project model and collaboration features submitting is easily done, however that doesn't mean that handling so many inter-dependent requests at once on the receiving end is as easy. Coolo sets out to change that! You can see all the nitty, gritty details on his Hackweek 9 project page
Less I/O → faster builds, Dinar Valeev
Dinar Valeev, a power pc guy from SUSE, want's to see if he can improve the I/O and therefor the time that is needed to set up the virtual environment where the OBS workers build packages in. He's going to try to achive that with read only mounted filesystem images for common dependencies. Surprise, surprise, this is especially beneficial for I/O poor archs like PPC970. You can see at SUSE they live and breathe the #1 guideline for creating good open source software:
"Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." - Eric S. Raymond
Social Software, Ancor González Sosa
While not directly part of the OBS the openSUSE software portal is a major consumer of the OBS API. It provides a nice "app store" like interface and a package search over all the great stuff you can find in the projects of the OBS reference server build.opensuse.org. Ancor González Sosa, recently hired by SUSE, is going to make the portal social by adding ratings, comments and best-of lists. He's going to base his work on the Appstream architecture and the Open Collaboration Services specification. This certainly will add a lot of fun to it!
OBS - Smack in the middle
As you can see, also at hackweek there is a lot going on with the Open Build Service. All of us are certainly looking forward to the results of this week of hack. Are you? :-)
