This week saw the release of the first milestone of openSUSE 12.1 and work on factory is continuing, I’ve found the following changes important:

GNU C Library (glibc) 2.13

We’ve updated glibc from version 2.11 to 2.13 which brings many bug fixes and AFAIK no major breakages to packages. The package itself got cleaned up a little bit as well, so please report any problems.

GO Programming Language

Factory now contains a compiler for the GO language which is “is an expressive, concurrent, garbage collected systems programming language that is type safe and memory safe.”. More details about GO are available on the openSUSE Wiki, the devel project with additional packages is devel:languages:go.

Packaging: Source Processing

The usage of _service files in Factory confused many packagers and resulted in broken packages so that these will be deprecated. As a replacement, Adrian implemented now a new source processing method and asks for testers.

Packaging: Adding useful Provides to cups drivers

Vincent “updated python-cups to a new version, and it is now shipping
files to automatically add Provides tag to packages that are shipping
cups drivers.”. This allows desktop packages to install the right printer driver – or users to do it via zypper. Packages with cups drivers just need to add a “BuildRequires: python-cups”.

Open Build Service Improvement

The “My Work” view has been updated to better show packages that are in review state and need your review. I suggest everybody to check out the page and cleanup your list.

Multiple Buildroots with osc

If you like to use more than one build at the same time, there are several options like pointed out on the opensuse-packaging mailing list:

• Use of the environment variable OSC_BUILD_ROOT to define a build root.
• Editing of the osc config file ~/.oscrc and setting build-root to contain the variables %(repo), %(arch),  %(project) or %(package).

Correction on auto-legal build service check

Jürgen corrected my report from last week: He would love to see the checks for auto-legal moved and welcomes any help.

Thanks

Thanks for the words of encouragement to my first blog post. I’ll try to continue this series. If there’s anything you think should be added to it, please contact me via email at aj at opensuse dot org.