openSUSE:Factory submissions

Factory development

Development Model - Factory submissions - Maintenance update process - Legal review - Factory review - Check-in - openSUSE review team - Tools - Release Process

Once a package gets submitted to openSUSE:Factory or to one of the released openSUSE distributions like openSUSE:12.1 as maintenance update, a couple of reviews are started to ensure that the package is working and of high quality. The focus of the following treatment is on submissions to factory, maintenance updates do get a similiar treatment.

Overview

The following flow-chart diagram illustrates the process of submitting packages to factory and handling the submission via reviews and check-in. The project openSUSE:Factory only accepts submit, delete and change devel requests. All other requests are discarded and not reviewed.

Let's look a bit closer at some of the steps.

Automatic Reviews

This is the first line of defense in reviewing. It catches common, repeated mistakes. These automatic review scripts are managed generally by the Factory release manager. These checks include (but this is not an exhaustive list):

does the package build?
does the package come from its devel project?
sanity checking of the specfile
legal-auto does a cursory check of the sources to search for license issues

See openSUSE-release-tools on GitHub for these scripts.

Legal review

If the automatic review by legal-auto finds issues, a full manual review is triggered.

For new packages, a full review of the sources is done to ensure that the package does not violate any licence or copyright constraints.

See Legal review for more info.

Factory Review

The openSUSE review team does a manual review of the submission following these guidelines.

Final review by the Factory release manager - and check-in

Once all previous reviews are successful, the release manager has the final say whether a package is checked in. Normally this is an easy decision, as the release manager trusts the reviews done previously. But exceptions do happen. The release manager then accepts the submit request, thus checks it into the distribution. The acceptance step is also a scheduling step - so the release manager will do it at an appropriate time.