During the “cleanup” of the HP-Education repository, I used a very interesting feature of the openSUSE Build Service: linking against revisions.

Sometimes, you want to patch a package from another repository to build with special features enabled or disabled. The Build Service allows you to link the package from this other repository (and avoid wasting space by duplicating the sources) and add your patches.

Now think about a patch against a special version of a package – and you know that you don’t want a package with a newer version in your repository for a foreseeable time. But if you use the plain link command of the Build Service, the linked package in your repository will get updated if the original package in the original project is updated.

Luckily, the buildservice allows you to link against a “frozen” state of a package: it’s source-revision. People already knowing any revision control systems like Subversion also know that the revision of a source is increased each time, a new change is submitted. And that’s what we need now: link against a special revision of the package from the other repository and apply our patch against it. The webclient currently doesn’t support such special features, but with osc it’s very easy.
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