Michal Hrušecký

Do you know what the HackWeek is about? Well probably most of openSUSE community members do. HackWeek is a week when we (at SuSE) don't work. Well, we work but on anything we want and we don't work on our regular duties. We can work with whoever we want and we can even take some community members to our workplace to help us. I'm really looking forward to this event. Well and as I'm quite a new at SuSE, this is my first HackWeek. So I'm even more excited.

What are my plans for HackWeek? I already wrote here that I think that some /etc managing tool can be really useful. I want to try to spend my HackWeek investigating and hopefully implementing some parts needed to make this feature possible. I know that it wouldn't be done in one HackWeek, but I'll get a better idea how much work is needed. I'll probably get some new ideas and better knowledge about this problem. And hopefully we will produce something useful. If not, we will learn what we were doing wrong That's sometimes quite useful too

This not really something new. Factory development is open for few weeks already. But what does this mean? What changed and how?

First thing that has changed is that our internal only tools doesn't work anymore. So everybody has to use BuildService to send packages to the openSUSE. Even people inside. That's a good. So now even community members can see how package is developed and developers will more probably notice submitrequests.

Second advantage even for ordinary users is that all Factory packages has to be developed in some topic project. So no more development in developers home project. Well, development can happened this way, but before it goes to the Factory, it has to go through topic project anyway. So people interested in bleeding edge packages will have easier situation.

Current disadvantage is that it's a little bit messy. Projects were created quite quickly and some time will be needed to merge some projects and to move other projects to the more meaningful location. But process already started and now it's all up to evolution

Third advantage and the reason for all this is that anybody can maintain package in Factory. Not only Novell/SuSE employees. So even YOU can have your package on next openSUSE DVD. How to do it? Create package in BuildService, send it to the correct topic project and convince other project members that you are reliable and willing to do this. Well, as this is new for all of us, we will see how it will work. But if you are interested in participation, we've got wiki page about it