This is great news: You can now install a GSM network using apt-get!

Thanks to the efforts of Debian developer Ruben Undheim, there's now an OpenBSC (with all its flavors like OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoSGSN, ...) package in the official Debian repository.

Here is the link to the e-mail indicating acceptance into Debian: https://tracker.debian.org/news/755641

I think for the past many years into the OpenBSC (and wider Osmocom) projects I always assumed that distribution packaging is not really something all that important, as all the people using OpenBSC surely would be technical enough to build it from the source. And in fact, I believe that building from source brings you one step closer to actually modifying the code, and thus contribution.

Nevertheless, the project has matured to a point where it is not used only by developers anymore, and particularly also (god beware) by people with limited experience with Linux in general. That such people still exist is surprisingly hard to realize for somebody like myself who has spent more than 20 years in Linux land by now.

So all in all, today I think that having packages in a Distribution like Debian actually is important for the further adoption of the project - pretty much like I believe that more and better public documentation is.

Looking forward to seeing the first bug reports reported through bugs.debian.org rather than https://projects.osmocom.org/ . Once that happens, we know that people are actually using the official Debian packages.

As an unrelated side note, the Osmocom project now also has nightly builds available for Debian 7.0, Debian 8.0 and Ubunut 14.04 on both i586 and x86_64 architecture from https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/network:osmocom:nightly. The nightly builds are for people who want to stay on the bleeding edge of the code, but who don't want to go through building everything from scratch. See Holgers post on the openbsc mailing list for more information.