On Monday 23 May 2011 15:59:02 Ricardo Chung wrote:
On Monday, May 23, 2011 8:05:03 AM Klaas Freitag wrote:
Am Montag 23 Mai 2011, 10:27:46 schrieb jdd:
Le 23/05/2011 10:17, Jos Poortvliet a écrit :
This list came up with the idea to rename
renaming is really necessary. It's incredibly difficult to explain to visitors what is OBS, when it's one of the best idea ever! OBS don't even translate (in french at least).
We spent a lot of time renaming it a few months ago. And this acronym (OBS) was a neutral distro recognized as openBuild Service was too.There are several articles on magazines, blogs and websites mention it. We should not spend more time with the name. What I think we need for OBS is a good content explaining what it is able to do for other Linux distros and FOSS Projects.
Can somebody explain in, may be, two lines, what exactly the OBS is?
"The openSUSE Build Service (OBS) is an open and complete distribution development platform. It provides the infrastructure to easily create and release open source software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions on different hardware architectures." [1]
I think it needs to include a wider vision about what the OBS is. Correct me if am I wrong. AFAIK the statement above is true, and OBS pretends to go beyond. You can even build a single package and make it avalable for different operating systems (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Mageia, including some Windows).So we can look at it as Universal Packager Distributor (UPD) as mature as it becomes to be. Some kind of Software Development Accelerator (SDA)
You know, a distribution is a whole bunch of packages that go onto your harddisk in an organized way. These packages (often) contain so called binary files that make sense for computers, not for a human. Software, however is (still) written by humans so they use a computer language that makes sense to humans. To make it consumeable for the computer, this must be translated to binary and put into packages, which is what the buildservice helps nicely.
I remember a discussion 5 years ago :-) that never could give an answer, but now that many are used with it, we could have one definition.
From this we could try finding a name
This discussion is finished AFAIK
As I mention it above despite a good name could be important is not more essential than a good exponation about what it is capable to do or help to do. Said so, what's the OBS, what can we do with OBS, and who can do it, benefits and advantages for other FOSS and Linux communities.
So, we know what OBS is. How to explain that properly is our next step. I created a piratepad, please go in and help describe OBS for the tens of thousands of users who visit build.opensuse.org and openbuildservice.org!!! http://piratepad.net/teolsuX2Op
hints:
"The OpenSUSE Build Service is a place where programmers can drop they code and have it automatically prepared for use in most Linux distribution and offer the result to the end users"
This is simply wrong. The process is unfortunately not automatic but a lot of work, that is why the project has many people doing work as packagers. The Buildservice is their tool which turns a whole hell lot of work to a lot of work (only).
Klaas
Best,