People who follow the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) developments might know it already, we work on an attribute system for OBS. But what it is good for at all ?

Our current driver is to enable every OBS user to do maintenance for packages in the maintained products (which are currently openSUSE 11.0, 11.1 and a few days 11.2). The maintenance concept itself is described in a very first draft here

However, the attribute system is way more powerful and can be used to store all kind of informations, attached to projects, source packages or even binary sub packages. The important thing here is that the attribute types have own permission rules. So it is for example possible to edit data in projects like openSUSE:11.1 or Fedora:9 which are usually read only.

A simple example is the OBS:Screenshot attribute, as you might guess you can attach references to screenshots to it. Every maintainer or bugowner has write access to it, this means if you are the bugowner of a package, you store this kind of informations not only in your projects, but also in the openSUSE:11.X project packages.

There is also the openSUSE:Playground attribute type created, just for you, when you like to play with this. Btw, the current available attribute types can be requested via “osc meta prj OBS”. And when you use the osc 0.123svn from svn trunk or openSUSE:Tools:Unstable Project, you can even check single attributes in different ways or create them.

For example:


osc meta attribute openSUSE:11.2 # Shows the attributes of the openSUSE:11.2 project
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE --attribute openSUSE:Playground --create # just creates the attribute in my home project
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE zphoto # returns empty, since the package hasn't the attribute.
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE zphoto --attribute-project # returns with attribute, since it falls back to the project


# stores two values (World Domination and fast) inside of the attribute:
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE --attribute openSUSE:Playground --set "World Domination,fast"
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE # shows all attributes in my home


osc search --attribute openSUSE:Playground # finds all packages in all projects with the openSUSE:Playground attribute
osc search --package zphoto --attribute openSUSE:Playground # finds all zphoto packages in all project with the openSUSE:Playground attribute


Okay, Okay, all that sounds not horrible sexy when you read it first. But imaging the possibilities. Each team or use case can get their own attributes. They decide what to store in which package, independend if they can modify the sources of project or not. So a team can easily mark packages for any kind of purpose (to fix bugreport 1234, to complete their product Z, to show the state of the packages on web page X, …).

The “osc mbranch” command from the maintenance concept shows also the power of this. You do not need to know where all instances of your package, just tell the server that you need to work on it and the server collects them all.

Please note that the API for the attribute system still might change until OBS 1.7 gets released, we may even need to remove the attributes (even though this is not planned). However, the version running at opensuse.org should be ready to play with this system. And I _really_ would like to hear any kind of feedback, ideas or requests. Can you please comment here, what you can imaging, what else you can use this system for ?

Thanks a lot !

PS: New attribute types can be defined only by the administrator atm, but I am really happy to create any kind of attributes for you, even though you just want to play with it!

The openSUSE Conference 09 has started today !

Some first impressions can get found on our gallery server already.

In case you are around Nuernberg, you can still drop by for a talk or a beer !

Okay, my first example of the build service source services did something usefull on my notebook. I submitted a very short file and I got installable packages in return. The file is actually that simple that it can easy get created by any IDE, website or desktop shortcut.

So the final goal is to get a 1-Click package build, but there is even more !

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We just released the Build Service 1.0 release candidate. The final release is expected in two weeks.

Most important about this release are the improvements in source handling. Submissions to foreign projects are possible now. That does mean that after two years of development, direct work on openSUSE distribution becomes possible, without bugzilla in between ! You see, we need sometimes a bit longer, but we keep our promises

The Build Service at http://build.opensuse.org is already running it, so it can be already used for submissions. You just need the current osc from openSUSE:Tools project.

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The web interface of the openSUSE Build Service behind http://build.opensuse.org is written with Ruby on Rails. The good thing about this is that you can easily setup an own instance of the web interface on your workstation using the server behind http://api.opensuse.org. All what you need is to checkout the sources, install the ruby on rails packages and run the server.

Installing the Ruby framework in matching release can be done as root user via:

# zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:Tools/YOUR_DISTRO openSUSE:Tools
# zypper install rubygem-rails-2_0

Getting the source code is easy just by anonymous checkout from svn:

# svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/buildservice/

Running the web interface is really easy now just by running

# cd buildservice/src/webclient
# ruby script/server

This runs a local instance where you can connect with any web browser using http://0.0.0.0:3000/ URL. So there is no need to install a full build service, no database administration, just checkout and run it You can easily edit files esp. below the app/ directory and customize or improve the web interface for your needs.

Of course it is easy to get svn write access, if you provide a useful patch

Have fun.