Portal:Packaging

Welcome to the Packaging Portal

Packaging is the task of building and bundling software with meta data such as the software's full name, description, a list of dependencies necessary for the software to run properly and the like. This is done so users of the software can use a package manager to conveniently install, remove or upgrade the software they use. Typical GNU/Linux distributions consist solely out of hundreds of such packages and openSUSE is no different in this regard. This makes Packaging the bread and butter development jobs for a distribution with tasks varying from writing a build description to fixing bugs in the software's source code.

Topics

Packaging Rules

Packaging mostly happens for the openSUSE distribution. The distribution tries to form a coherent product out of the vast mosaic of open source projects. Packaging is the means to form the projects and therefore packaging for the openSUSE distribution has a lot of rules.

We adhere to the general Linux Standard Base (LSB) that tries to reduce the differences between individual Linux distributions.
We also follow the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which is a reference on how to manage a Linux filesystem hierarchy.
Additional to these general rules every Linux distribution follows, openSUSE has its own set of Packaging guidelines which regulate all the nitty gritty details of packaging for the distribution.

The article How to contribute to Factory contains tutorials and guidelines to get involved into the distribution development, for example how to fix problems in existing packages or how to add new packages to the distribution.

For the above process you can become bugowner, maintainer, or project maintainer for various projects/packages in Open Build Service. The Package maintainership guide describes how to behave in such role.

Packaging Help

There are two very extensive guides for the RPM and Dpkg package formats that will give you an introduction. The RPM Packaging Guide and the Debian New Maintainers' Guide. We will not try to duplicate them but concentrate on the openSUSE tools and workflows which means all our documentation expects that you know your way around the package formats. For a general guide about packaging and to find useful tools and workflows we recommend the Awesome Package Maintainer guide.

All packaging happens in the openSUSE Open Build Service instance, our open and complete distribution development platform. Therefore the most important piece of documentation for you as a packager is the Build Service Tutorial. Its very RPM centric so we have another document describing Debian builds. You can also have a look at the Tips and Tricks and, if you are interested to build for more than one distribution, at the Cross Distribution Howto. The process of publishing fixed packages for already released products is covered in the Maintenance Portal.

Communicate

#packaging:opensuse.org (Matrix)
#opensuse-packaging (Libera.Chat)
packaging@lists.opensuse.org - is the mailinglist to discuss packaging.
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