After getting asked daily why package X or project Y is in a certain state, why it is not yet published or if a “trigger rebuild” button click is needed, I finally got around and implemented the last planned feature for OBS 1.7.

Each repository has a scheduler state now for each architecture. This state tells you in which state the scheduler saw it the last time he looked at it. In addition to that, there is also a “dirty” flag. This gets set, when something happened what requires a re-calculation by the scheduler, but he has not done this yet. So no need to hit the “trigger rebuild” button in this case, it won’t help 😉

A typical state round trip is the following, it can stop at any point and restart from a higher listed state again if this is needed:

unknown: a repo has just been created for this architecture. The scheduler has not seen this yet. This is currently the case also in most repos, just because the scheduler with this new code has not looked at all existing repos yet. But you will see this only in very rare cases in future.
scheduling: the scheduler is looking at this repo right now. The package states will get updated soon (from 1 second up to 2 minutes, depending on the project complexity)

blocked: packages from other repos need to build first until any of the packages from this repo can get build.
building: packages are scheduled for building, this means they are in “build”, “scheduled” or “finished” state.

unpublished: all packages got built, publishing is disabled, so nothing is to do here anymore.
or
finished: all packages which require a build have been built. This repo is enabled for publishing, but this has not yet happened.
publishing: The publisher is currently processing this repository.
published: the latest built packages have been uploaded to the stage server and are available via download.opensuse.org

Future plans for this are to add this state list in the web interface somehow, so everybody gets an explanation in the context.

Another thing what I want to add is a button beside the “unpublished” state, to force a publishing. So by default nothing gets published, but the project owner can force it when he things it makes sense. However, this is now also possible to achieve by swithing the publish flag and revert it after some time. The OBS is now even publishing when the build has already finished (unlike before).