BitTorrent Sync on openSUSE

Recently, I discovered BitTorrent Sync, which seems to satisfy most of my file syncing demands. It's encrypted client-side, cross-platform and works behind NATs and firewalls. While it is currently still proprietary (who cares, really), it is available for many devices. Besides the usual Windows / Mac binaries, you can find it on Android's Play Store. …

openSUSE Board candidacy

Hello fellow geekos, Let's start with a little introduction for those that don't know me. I've been involved in the openSUSE project for more than 3 years by now while being among the top ten contributors to Factory for most of the time. I mainly develop the Python and Go stacks as well as OpenStack. …

OBS: Introducting the “refresh_patches” source service

As you know, RPM (and DEB and ...) package building is a repetitive process and you would want to automate it as much as possible. In the context of the Open Build Service(OBS), source services can help you with exactly that. Over the time, the OBS community has implemented a whole range of source services. …

Official Last.fm scrobbler for openSUSE

Good news, the official Last.fm audio scrobbler is now available for openSUSE through the Packman package repositories. Why do I care, you might question yourselves and you're partly right, openSUSE already ships a big bunch of multimedia apps (like Amarok, Clementine and Banshee) that all have Last.fm support built-in. However, for all of those you …

The times they are a changin’

Everything changes, so do our packages. But change needs to be explained in order to become relevant. Regarding packaging, this involves the art of writing good changelog entries. Here is an example from an otherwise very capable packager: Spec files updates: Changes in License. Updates in Group:, Summary: and %description entries. Updates in %build section …

Summer of Code approaches

As in the past years, Google's Summer of Code is going to happen again and we're currently collecting ideas for openSUSE. So if you want to support your favorite distribution or seek a way to getting involved more deeply, be sure to check out our GSoC info page. Or, if you want it cross-distro, the …

I can haz groups in deh Build Service!

A new feature of the upcomming openSUSE Build Service release is the revised role management for users and groups in the web user interface: As you can see, all the available roles are now directly exposed, allowing you to manage all users and groups for your project or package in one place. Currently, group creation …

Getting the sources of your RPMs

According to the GPL, you have to provide the source code of any (GPL-licensed) software you distribute (i.e. package and publish). Traditionally, this is satified by Linux distributions in several ways. Like any other package management system, RPM metadata contains the URL of the upstream project that created the software. This is where the (unmodified) …

Braindead Python packaging

As you all know, distributing and building packages with the openSUSE Build Service is easy and fun. The only party pooper is that you have to write a spec file to get your RPMs out there. Thanks to darix, we have a decent solution at least for Ruby packages: gem2rpm, a script which auto-generates RPM …

Back at home

I had an awesome week in Nice! But as everything has an end, I'm updating my openSUSE installation right now and sipping a cup of coffee. Back to normal, one could say. A more detailed post about recent adventures can be found here (in german).