GNOME/OSC plugins

From openSUSE

Introduction

OSC (the Build_Service client) provides a very easy way to add plugins (see Build_Service/osc_plugins), so we are taking advantage for this to write several plugins to help us dealing with patches. Other sources of information for writing OSC plugins are:

• Plugin that allows to make raw HTTP requests via the BS API

Downloading

The plugins we are writing are contained on a package called osc-plugins-gnome, which can be downloaded from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/maw/openSUSE_Factory/. Replace openSUSE_Factory with your distro as appropriate.

What the plugins do

So far, these are the plugins we have available:

• createspec: creates a basic SPEC file to be used when packaging new software.
• listpatches: displays information about patches contained in packages within a given repository.
• patchlint: checks patches and their conformance to our patch guidelines.
• speclint: checks SPEC files for correctness.

To get more information on these commands, after installing them, run:

osc $command --help

Hacking on the plugins

We keep our source in Git.

• Rodrigo's GIT branch: http://www.gnome.org/~rodrigo/git/osc-plugins.git
• Michael's GIT branch: http://primates.ximian.com/~maw/git/osc-plugins

When hacking on the plugins, the easiest way to test them is to create symlinks from $HOME/.osc-plugins to the plugins in your working directory. That way you don't need to go through the hassle of installing them.

Invitation to contribute

When working on packages, do you ever find yourself doing something repetititive or tedious and saying to yourself, "Self, this is ridiculous! The computer should be doing this for me!"?

Here's a good chance to do something about it. So far, only members of the GNOME team are working on the plugins, but there is little that's GNOME-specific about them, and we welcome contributions from people of all stripes. Feel free to jump in!