The Linux Beacon--openSUSE Build Service Pumps Out Red Hat, CentOS Packages

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Volume 5, Number 4 -- January 29, 2008

openSUSE Build Service Pumps Out Red Hat, CentOS Packages

Published: January 29, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The openSUSE community that is backed by commercial Linux distributor Novell and that has created an open, publicly available build service as the backbone of the openSUSE development version of SUSE Linux announced last week that it can now package open source programs with two competitive Linuxes. With the ability to package applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and their clones from alternative RHEL supplier, CentOS, the openSUSE Build Service is that much more useful.

When Novell moved to an open development model for its open source implementation of Linux, called SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on the laptop and desktop, the company did more than open up the development of the code to some outside techies and give them some passwords to access a versioning system. The company went the extra mile and created the openSUSE Build Service, which was a means to not only pick Linux and application source code and slap them together into a compiled package for various types of iron. From the get-go, Novell wanted the openSUSE Build Service to be applicable to other Linuxes and supporting different packaging methods. As such, the build service supported the openSUSE and SUSE Linux distributions of Novell's Linux as well as packaging up applications for Ubuntu and Debian Linuxes as well.

SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its Fedora development releases) adhere to the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) format as the installation wrapper around applications, while the Debian variants of Linux, including Ubuntu, use the Deb file format. Novell has adopted RPM for its NetWare 6.5 operating system, and IBM's AIX Unix variant can also handle RPM formats for open source applications. With Red Hat Linuxes already supporting the RPM format, having the openSUSE Build Service support the packaging of RPMs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, as it does as of last week, is not that big of a deal from a technical angle. Ditto for CentOS 4 and 5, which are the de-Red Hatted variants of RHEL 4 and 5 that are offered as an alternative to RHEL with much lower-priced tech support than Red Hat offers.

The fact that the openSUSE Build Service can spit out packages for RHEL and CentOS Linuxes does, however, make a big difference for companies creating their own Linux application stacks, especially independent software vendors and open source project managers who want to get their code on specific Linuxes in the easiest way possible.

Interestingly, the Build Service could be used to build other variants of Linux, according to Holger Dyroff, vice president of SUSE Linux product management at Novell. But thus far, no one has asked for it.

As for the supporting of other operating systems and packaging methods for applications, Dyroff says that Novell and the openSUSE project are keeping an open mind, but are only going to do the things that the community asks for and supports the development of. "We will follow developer demand," Dyroff explains. "It's not our goal to provide support for every Linux distribution on the planet, but it is also not our goal to exclude any Linux, either."

It would, of course, be very interesting if the openSUSE Build Service could do Solaris from Sun Microsystems, HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard, Mac OS X from Apple Computer, and Windows from Microsoft--especially Windows. But the most popular program for packaging Windows applications, InstallShield, is a closed source program, and Dyroff busted up laughing when I suggested that it was perfectly legal to do a clean, black box implementation of a program that worked exactly like InstallShield and then add Windows support for open source applications as part of the build service.

To date, there are close to 3,897 packagers who are using the openSUSE Build Service, and they have created more than 33,000 packages based on over 1,800 open source application projects that are in the openSUSE repository. In the last ten months, the openSUSE project has seen 1.6 million downloads of the openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3 releases as well. This is a large number of people that are putting the development releases for SUSE Linux through the paces.