feasibility question

English Open Build Service (OBS)
1

Am not familiar with OpenSUSE or OBS. Spent a day trying to go through the wiki information. I have an idea in my head and am trying to figure out how feasible it would be to use the OpenSuse Build System to get to the end result I want. Would appreciate any information or suggestions anyone could offer on this.

I want to build about 40 or so cross-platform applications. I know at least some of them didn’t turn up in the search when I looked for packages for them for OpenSuse. I currently have cross-platform tools that create build scripts. Right now, I just have slackbuild or mingwport style shell script formats as output, but others are possible. I use the build script to compile and build the software with any appropriate patches for the operating system if needed. The final result of the slackbuild script is a tarball with init script in bash, description file and a list of dependent libraries if any. Is there a way to move this system over to OBS and use it to build the software by calling my tools to create and run the build scripts?

I’ve seen some tools to convert rpm to tgz or txz. Are there any good tools to create rpms from tgz or txz files? Do I need the final result to be in rpm format to work with OBS?

Any clarification on what the OBS system can or cannot due as far as integrating the way I’m currently building applications would be greatly appreciated.

2

I do not understand what your existing tools do, but keep in mind:

  1. OBS has the philosophy to start with a pristine source code package as distributed. It should be packed with bzip2.

  2. Under control of a *.spec file the bzip2-packed package is unpacked, then the necessary patches (which must be uploaded as well) required for the respective distribution are applied and compilation is started. The spec file may trigger conditional execution depending on the target distribution.

  3. The compiled package is then installed and from this installation directory an rpm package is generated. This means that you do not start with any rpm, but the rpm is the final product.

This means that the packager provides for the original source, any pach files or additional files required and the *.spec file for the package.