We know that the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) is incredibly popular in the SUSE world, but outside of it this is not entirely true. However, it is great to see that more information on the OBS is getting out more and more these days. Most importantly, information such as that you can trivially build packages for other distributions, or that there are Build Service (licenced under the GPL, of course) packages available for other distributions.

Liquidat’s recent blog posts (Building Fedora packages using the OpenSuse Build Service and First results with OpenSuse Build Service) are a good case in highlighting an outsider’s take and first impression on the OBS. That is, in just a little while packagers from other distributions can start easily building and hosting packages directly on the OBS. Particularly for RPM-based distributions (Fedora, Mandriva), you require just a few conditionals in the RPM spec files in order to get separate packages quickly (as in 150 buildhosts’ type of quickness!) built for all relevant distributions. And this is a point that should really be stressed.

I find this kind of news exciting because it is a very palpable way in which we can maximise collaboration between our friends on other distributions. For example, other distributions could work together to also provide packages for the latest KDE, KDE4, Compiz Fusion, Mozilla family of applications, or on any of those other thousands of packages that are already in the OBS, and of course packages that are not in there yet, but that are available elsewhere. Distributions are not forced to package things in a particular way, so packages can always be built to the highest quality for each respective distribution.

If particular teams on each distribution (i.e. team X on Fedora and team X on openSUSE) would work together in maintaining some repositories, then there would really be some favourable advantages. It would be good for developers since we know that maximisation of collaboration avoids duplication of effort (where it is unnecessary), and it is great for users since it ensures that they can have more applications easily accessible, and more updates to these applications and packages available quickly. Basically the exact same reasons for why the Build Service is so useful to openSUSE itself.

Since the technology is fully available it would be great to see some things (i.e. some application or project repositories) going this way in the future.

Update: A couple more posts from the blogosphere:
* BuildService — how to use it
* liquidat on OpenSuse Build Service