For those of you that have been dodging the use of the openSUSE Build Service because it’s from openSUSE- good news! They seem to have had a slight name change and you can now refer to it simply as the Build Service. I think they should have gone for The Build Service, but then the acronym TBS is trademarked, so…
A great introduction to the Build Service can be found at the openSUSE news site because of some upcoming conference sessions on using this great tool. A couple choice tidbits:
The Build Service runs on a server and builds packages by starting a clean virtualized operating system for every package that needs to be built. The Build Service will automatically install the needed dependencies (specified in the build files) in the virtual image and build the package. In case any errors occur, it will report these back to the packager. The openSUSE Build Service running on build.opensuse.org currently supports Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandriva, CentOS, Debian, SLE and Fedora besides openSUSE. And all that can be controlled entirely from a web interface — which supports even Internet Explorer.
The Build Service is a completely open source server solution; users can download the source code and create a locally hosted build service project tailored to their own requirements — particularly useful if they are developing for unsupported platforms. Several software projects have employed this soulution, including the Linux Foundation in developing MeeGo, the collaborative open source project aiming to develop a new GUI for netbooks and mobile devices.
The end result? An app listing like luckyBackup’s. Scroll down and you can see the packages that are available. That’s right- every major distro. How’s that for some instant credibility? That’s a lot of users that won’t have to wonder how messy the compile is going to be.
Find tons of documentation at http://en.opensuse.org//Portal:Build_Service and get started building packages for every major Linux distribution. Give it a try!