Packaging/Packaging Day

From openSUSE

Packaging Day II

A number of openSUSE community members are holding the second online packaging workshop on Friday, April 4 and Saturday, april 5. The target is to help interested communities to come on speed with the Build Service, help interested people to successfully build new software to provide it to the openSUSE community and other linux users. Therefore the build service infrastructure is open and since days the buildservice is fed, tuned, polished and greased to present itself in the best shape for you ;-))

When

Friday, April 4th, 2008 through Saturday, April 5th, 2008 in any timezone that you can imagine. That means from the morning in Australia on Friday, through the late afternoon on Saturday in the Americas.

Who

Members of the openSUSE team will participate and be available for any help with packaging. Hopefully you will too. Although anyone is welcome to join in, people with prior experience compiling software will benefit the most.

What

We will help new packagers to create packages for software that isn't currently available for openSUSE. We invite people to roll up their sleeves and get involved. If you have this fancy application or tool that isn't packaged yet, and you're not afraid to learn how to do it yourself, then this is for you.

The following pages list packages people are interested in having and are therefore good sources of ideas.

• KDE package wishlist
• GNOME package wishlist
• General wishlist

However, anything else can be packaged as well. You don't have to fulfill anyone's todo list :)

Where

On irc.freenode.net, we'll use the IRC channel #opensuse-buildservice for this. If you have very KDE centric questions, #opensuse-kde is the right place to start, #opensuse-gnome for GNOME.

Additionally there is the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org mailing list, see Mailinglists and Communicate/Mailinglists#Development_Lists.

Why

This workshop has two basic aims:

More packages

Although we have an impressive array of packages available in openSUSE, there's always more software that people want in a packaged form -- stuff our Esteemed Competitors have but we don't, as well as stuff nobody yet offers. We would like to increase the amount of software we have available ready to use and all preconfigured for your openSUSE.

New packagers

This will be a good opportunity for people who have hitherto done little or no packaging to learn how to do it, with helpful people being available to answer all the little questions one might have.

How

If you're interested, we suggest that you get an account on the Build Service; see the requirements to do so. In fact, read the whole page.

General information about creating packages for openSUSE is available:

• the Packaging and package conventions pages are good starting points.
• The KDE packaging cookbook and the GNOME packaging page are good sources of documentation specific to KDE and GNOME packages, respectively.
• Fedora RPM Guide is an offsite link, but contains lots of information about RPM itself.

In addition, learning how to build the software you want to package from source is essential for being able to provide binary packages. You should get familiar with the project specific oddities, as this will tremendously speed up the packaging process.