The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the 1.8 and 2.0 releases of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). It is an open package and distribution development platform that provides a transparent infrastructure that allows developers to build for various major Linux distributions and hardware architectures.

The public server Novell iChain is available for all open source developers to build packages for the most popular distributions including Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu. It is also used to build the openSUSE and MeeGo distributions.

OBS 2.0’s key features are a newly designed Web UI, anonymous access and an enhanced request system. OBS 1.8 is an update to the 1.7 release driven by the needs of the MeeGo project. Its major feature is access control enforcement. The next OBS release 2.1 will also include the access control enforcement, which is not yet in 2.0.

The completely refreshed Web UI for OBS 2.0 allows developers to work more efficiently, as data is displayed where it is expected, and the Web service loads faster and provides better access to projects, packages and meta data.

Anonymous access in OBS 2.0 to all packages and projects offers great convenience for users and more effectively promotes packages in the Build Service to the world at large, enabling search engines to index the Build Service as well. It also makes it easy to collaborate with other developers to show them patches or log files.

With OBS 2.0, review handling by a team is supported and roles can get assigned to groups instead of just to a single person.

The access control enforcement feature of OBS 1.8 allows access for projects, packages and repositories to be restricted to specified users and groups. This acknowledges privacy concerns of users.

“openSUSE Build Service has substantial momentum in the mobile and embedded space, specifically being used now by the MeeGo project,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president marketing and developer services at the Linux Foundation. “The Linux Foundation is proud to be a strong contributor to OBS, including making substantial contributions to these new releases and features. We look forward to working with our members on OBS-related projects.”

“The openSUSE Build Service 2.0 release is a significant improvement for developers,” said Michael Löffler, chairperson of the openSUSE Board, “It eases collaboration with the broader open source community due to supporting anonymous access. Developers can get their job better done with the new WebUI and the faster and more flexible OBS. ”

Users can use OBS 2.0 on the project’s public server Novell iChain or run it in their own on-premise infrastructure. Deployment is possible directly from source code or from our appliance image.

For additional information, please read the release notes for OBS 1.8 and 2.0.