One of the great things we’ve got at openSUSE is openSUSE Build Service. Web service where we can commit sources and recipes and it will produce bunch of binaries for various distributions. Not just for openSUSE. We are friendly people and we love to work together with other distributions. After all, we all have a common goal – make open source succeed and defeat common enemies (some greedy people trying to steal some of our freedoms). OBS follows this path and it is a great tool that can help anybody to package his software for any distribution. It is easy to use and easy to get involved. We even have a public instance where anybody can submit a data and use package for his own purpose. If you want to build a package just for Fedora, we will let you do that. Of course we will be much happier if you’ll consider building it for openSUSE as well, but we don’t force you to do so.
As developers prefer command line interface over the mighty web, we’ve got a tool called osc. Command line utility that let’s you use most of the service via command line. We are even building packages of it for many distributions in OBS. You can just grab a package and use it. But we can’t cover every distribution 🙁
Now comes the second part of my post. I have been using Gentoo for a long time and I’m still maintaining some Gentoo computers even though majority of my computers runs openSUSE. I don’t want to compare these two distributions with quite different target audience. But this post is related to both distributions, so I’m stating, that I know both. I also have some friends using Gentoo and I think there are quite some skilled developers around the Gentoo. But Gentoo is also one of the distributions for which we don’t have prebuild packages of osc. Guess why 😉 But we want everybody to be able to use Open Build Service! So I stepped up and I’m glad that I can announce, that ebuild for osc landed in portage tree yesterday! So if you were recommending OBS to some Gentoo user who wanted some better tool to use it than webbrowser or if you are Gentoo user wanting to create binaries of his software for variety of distributions, check out dev-util/osc 😉