Linux 4ever Blog

Say, you’re a software developer. Say, you want to write an easy-to-install program for any Linux distribution. I’d say, “You have a problem.” OpenSUSE, however, has improved upon its solution for this problem: the openSUSE Build Service, which now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.

The problem, in more detail, is that, despite such standardization efforts as the LSB (Linux Standard Base) and Portland Project, unless you expect users to compile their own programs from source-code, it’s not easy to create programs that will install and run on every popular Linux variation.

What openSUSE Build Service supplies are the tools needed for developers to release open source software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions on different hardware architectures. The project began a year ago when Novell released the first alpha version of the Build Service.

The build service enables developers to build programs for different hardware platforms without a “compiler farm” of different hardware. It also provides automatic resolving of dependencies to other packages. If a program depends on another package, say a KDE application on a Trolltech Qt library, the KDE application will be rebuilt automatically if its Qt library is changed and rebuilt. This, in turn, takes much of the donkey work out of building applications for Linux.

In a statement, Michael Loeffler, openSUSE product manager at Novell, said, “as its name suggests, the openSUSE project is committed to choice and opposed to the exclusion of innovation simply because it may have originated in another project.”

By adding support “to build packages for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the openSUSE Build Service makes it even easier to build packages across multiple Linux distributions,” the statement said.

Francis Giannaros, an openSUSE board member, said in a statement, “Web software created by specific Linux distributions has often been hindered by its proprietary nature that restricts its use by others. The openSUSE Build Service remains completely free and open software, and now we are adding full support for building packages for all popular distributions directly at openSUSE.org.

The addition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS [a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone] as build targets further emphasizes the commitment of the openSUSE Build Service to flexibility, making it the perfect option for a central development platform. It is also user friendly, stable and actively developed.”

The openSUSE Build Service now supports openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and CentOS. It can be used with a Web interface, or a Python or Perl-based command-line tool.

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