Knowledge Base

Introduction

I have started using the public instance of the Open Build Service (OBS), aka openSUSE Build Service. This post documents my process for taking a package upstream, my packaging recipe (to use the OBS parlance), and getting a hosted package. If you want to duplicate my efforts with your own packages, I hope this helps.

The process

Install osc

The openbuild service command line tool is available in the Devuan ceres repos already, as package name osc.

Select what upstream package to build

My example will use FreeFileSync, because I already bundle it for Devuan and it only takes a few minutes to compile. Additionally, because the upstream provides only a zip file, I am using my collaborative Opensource Tracking repo for the tarball which dpkg seemed to require and I gave up investigating how to get it to use a zip file as a source.

Prepare to use ocs locally

Osc seems to operate pretty similar to version control, with commits and so on. If necessary, initialize osc and checkout the project. On the openSUSE OBS instance, it's probably the home project.

mkdir -p ~/osc ; cd ~/osc
osc checkout home:bgstack15

Build package with osc

Make a new package, either on cli or on the web interface.

osc mkpac freefilesync

Source: Reference 3 Retrieve the upstream source tarball, and prepare the debian.tar.xz file. I store my dpkg intructions in the exploded directory form in git. So to assemble the debian.tar.xz, I have a few additional steps. In another location, extract the source tarball, and copy in the debian/ directory. Outside the directory from the tarball, run dpkg-source.

cd ~/deb
tar -zxf freefilesync_10.13.orig.tar.gz
cp -pr ~/dev/stackrpms/freefilesync/debian ./FreeFileSync-10.13/
dpkg-source -b FreeFileSync-10.13

Now the assets required by OBS should exist. Copy in the .dsc and debian tarball to the osc project directory.

[bgstack15@myhost|/home/bgstack15/osc/home:bgstack15/freefilesync]$ ls -al
total 2116
-rw-r--r-- 1 bgstack15 bgstack15    9588 Jun 28 13:49 freefilesync_10.13-1+devuan.debian.tar.xz
-rw-r--r-- 1 bgstack15 bgstack15    1073 Jun 28 13:49 freefilesync_10.13-1+devuan.dsc
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bgstack15 bgstack15 2147432 Jun 28 13:14 freefilesync_10.13.orig.tar.gz

I can perform a local build to ensure it builds correctly.

osc build --local-package Debian_Testing x86_64

That will run for a while, and have to download all the build dependencies on the first run too. If all that was successful, it's time to add the assets and commit.

osc add *
osc commit

Build package on OBS

The assets are now the public OBS. My builds triggered right away when I committed the changes. It took time for build workers to kick off and return the results, but my packages were published within a few hours! If you want to tell the OBS to rebuild a package, select the status message of the Build Results section. At the top of the log page, select the "Trigger Rebuild" button. Or you could run osc rebuild command.

Using the repository

Of course the reason you want to use the OBS is to build packages to install them! A pretty front page is available for a project. Here's my freefilesync one. It shows up as debian unstable, but it should work on devuan too.

Install the apt key

wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:bgstack15/Debian_Unstable/Release.key -O Release.key
apt-key add - > Release.key
apt-get update

Install the packages

You can inspect and make sure the package is in your metadata and coming from the expected repo.

$ apt-cache policy freefilesync
freefilesync:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 10.13-1+devuan
  Version table:
     10.13-1+devuan 500
        500 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/bgstack15/Debian_Unstable  Packages

Install the package!

apt-get install freefilesync

Final thoughts

I tried using a _service file (example) to automate the build tasks. It involves having the .dsc files available (such as in source control), which is generated from dpkg-source -b dirname-of- package/. If I have to do all that, and upload the dsc file, and then have the build nodes do all the same work, it's not really worth it to me. Also, I never got it working because I'm not as smart as that guy in the example.

References

A random, fellow Devuan user thinks it's OK to use the OBS debian repos for Devuan packages. Steven Pusser's Pale Moon project was a great example to me. Beginnerʼs Guide | Open Build Service My debuild instructions:

cl ; time debuild -us -uc 2>&1 | tee -a ~/log/debuild.$( basename "$( pwd )" ).$( date "+%F" ).log ; echo $? ; debuild -- clean 1>/dev/null 2>&1 ;